The group straggled toward the door, murmuring compliments and thanks. Zoe appeared bearing Ciara’s pink pelt. Keith said to Jean, “We’ll do the interview tomorrow afternoon, okay?”
“Oh aye,” Ciara added. “Two p.m. at the Granite Cross—most everyone’s there of a Sunday afternoon. Will your husband be playing again, Rebecca?”
“That can be arranged,” Rebecca returned.
“Super,” said Ciara.
“I’ll write up what I’ve learned today and we can take it from there.” Jean retrieved her bag and the folder and made a break for the door. “Thank you, Minty, wonderful food—Rebecca, I’ll drive you back to town—Ciara, Keith.” She was on the path, across the lawn, and in the car before she stopped to breathe.
Rebecca climbed in beside her. “So then, what did you learn today?”
“Ciara’s not a total airhead. She’s got a good grasp of what it’s going to take to restore Ferniebank. As for playing ‘what if,’ well, I do that, too, although as Alasdair was saying, there’s a difference between stories and lies. Who was it who said you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts?” Jean exited the school driveway and turned toward town just as Keith’s car exited the house driveway and turned the other way. Jean veered, he veered, and each car steadied as it went.
Jean watched the other car dwindle in the rearview mirror, then concentrated on the road. Within moments she was pulling up in front of the Reiver’s Rest, a white-painted modern house that looked more efficiently comfortable than stylish.
“Speaking of Alasdair,” said Rebecca, so casually Jean knew the jig was up, “would you like to do just that? Come in for tea and sympathy. You know, girl-talk. We’ll send Michael to his room, although his opinion would be worthwhile.”
“What happened when his old girlfriend turned up at Rudesburn?” Jean countered.
“Ah. Well. She was murdered.”
Jean winced. “Ow. I knew y’all had been involved in a couple of murder cases—it’s like the plague, it’s going around—but . . . I’m sorry I asked.”
“It all brought us closer together. Eventually.”
Eventually. “Do you think being involved in murder cases has made you, well, a lot quicker to suspect crimes?”
“You mean are we wondering about losing both Helen and Wallace in the same way, in the same place, at almost the same time? Yeah, we’ve speculated about that, but coincidences happen, and there’s no evidence anything’s wrong. Or is there?”
Jean reminded herself that Alasdair the gambler, the scientist, liked to keep his cards face down and his formulas private. “I need to get back to Ferniebank and tell Alasdair about Angus and Ciara. Plus I overheard Zoe say that Ciara told Shannon to take the morning off, and that Derek’s mother has been telling people Isabel left a curse on the place.”
“The thot plickens, then.” Rebecca clambered out of the car. “Keep us posted on the inscription and everything. The ‘everything’ being at your discretion, of course.”
“Thanks,” Jean returned, with the first genuine smile that had broken her face since sometime that morning. And it was now, she noted as she drove away, almost three p.m., four and a half hours until closing time. Until she had any hope—or fear—of getting Alasdair’s undivided attention.
The road to Ferniebank unfurled ahead. “ ‘O see ye not yon narrow road,’ ” she declaimed to the windshield, “ ‘so thick beset with thorns and briers? That is the path of righteousness, though after it but few enquires.’ Should be enquire, singular, but that doesn’t rhyme.”
The distant hillsides were brushed with a faint tint of pinkish-purple heather. Autumn was just over the horizon. Even now, the occasional ray of sun was still warm, but a coolness in the breeze and an opacity to the lengthening shadows hinted of chill, dark days to come, hopefully not soon.
There was the farm, with Roddy now leaning on the fence contemplating a herdlet of fat cows on the hill above. The two black and white lumps at his feet were the dogs Hector and Jackie, minus the patriarch Nero. Maybe the deaths of the elderly had come in threes. All of them since Ciara made her deal and moved to Glebe House, although a more unlikely angel of death Jean couldn’t imagine.
There was the gateway in the ancient wall, and the glowering castle parapets. Jean guided the car into the courtyard much more sedately than she had guided it out, and was surprised to find the parking area almost full, with people standing around holding leaflets and candy bars. She squeezed her car in next to Alasdair’s.
She’d barely slammed the door when he stepped out of the shop. They looked at each other, separated by five or six yards of gravel and several fathoms of outer space. His expression was pared to the minimum, stern but no longer icy. Jean hoped her own expression was a better containment field than it had been earlier. “Business is good today,” she ventured.
“We’re picking up Rosslyn’s overflow,” Alasdair replied, “just as Ciara intends.”
From inside the shop came a strain of harp music. The hair twitched on Jean’s neck. Then she realized she was hearing a CD, setting the scene for the visitors, and her nape slumped back down.
“I’ve covered up the spyhole,” he went on. “I’ve reported the, ah, loss of the inscription.”
“I saw Logan heading this way.” Jean didn’t think either of them had blinked so far. That much she would concede—she closed her burning eyes and opened them. “The tall tweedy guy who was with Ciara this morning. It was Angus. There are photos of him at Glebe House.”
“Eh?” Alasdair’s forehead pleated into its police-inspector frown. “He came peching back up the path and hid himself in the van just as Logan arrived. What game is Ciara after playing now?”
“Right now she and Keith are off to Hawick to talk to D.I. Delaney about the inscription. He’s come down from Edinburgh. Maybe he’ll listen to you this time.”
“Chance would be a fine thing,” Alasdair said sarcastically. “Logan, now, he’s gone haring off after Derek, looking to interview him about the inscription.”
“I doubt if Derek would have chiseled it out so carefully and picked up all the pieces.”
“He might have done if he had a buyer waiting.”
“I can’t see a sixteen-year-old kid working the international antiquities trade. And a grave inscription isn’t going to get buyers as excited as, say, the Mona Lisa.”
The harp music stopped, to be followed by a soulful tenor singing about buttoning up, and being cheery, and taking a dram before going. Alasdair was just plugging in the CDs that were already there, wasn’t he? She’d have to give him the ones she had in the car, Hugh Munro, Runrig, Wolfstone, Gallowglass, Seven Nations. Sentiment wore thin pretty fast. Didn’t Ciara say something to that effect, about Gerald Rutherford’s tales of Ferniebank?
A bubble of garlic burst in her throat. Music and food could be ends in themselves, but they were also sublimation for embraces. Not necessarily sexual embraces. Just the pressing of flesh to flesh, to close out the chill . . . She was still looking at Alasdair. He was still looking at her. Apology seemed to be a possibility, which was more than she would have thought three hours ago, but who was going to bend his or her stiff neck by going first?
A family came out of the castle, parents herding children toward the shop and its booklets and souvenirs, not to mention its snacks. “We’ll have us a blether,” Alasdair said, just as Jean said the same thing, “We’ll talk,” and turned toward the flat.
The avian day shift, several crows, began squabbling among the appropriately named crow-stepped gables. The haggis and its sauces and pastries shifted in Jean’s stomach like an insomniac irritably punching his pillow. If she had to eat crow later on, fine, she could choke it down, but Alasdair was darn well going to have to share the meal.
Inside the flat, she discovered Dougie dozing on the windowsill, paws and tail tucked so tightly beneath his body he resembled a tea cozy. She changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, smoothed the covers on the bed—not that they were at all untidy—and returned to the living room humming about taking drams and long remembering this night.
What she couldn’t remember was the rest of the song. She didn’t really want to, since it was a song of parting, but looking it up on the internet was something to do. Casting a sharp look at the answering machine, she set her laptop on the desk and hijacked the telephone line.
Ah, yes. The song was written by a Sinclair from Caithness, the lowlands beyond the Highlands, the rolling green county at the northeastern peak of Britain with its steep sea-girt cliffs overlooking Orkney. One branch of the Sinclairs was connected with the Borders and Rosslyn, the other with Caithness and Orkney, although it was hard to tell the players without a program. A Henry from Rosslyn had fought with Bruce at Bannockburn. One from Orkney and Rosslyn both had supposedly sailed to America, with the evidence being stylized ears of corn—or as they called it here, maize—carved around a window frame at Rosslyn. Jean, who had grown up picking corn kernels out of her teeth, thought the carvings looked as much like maize as she looked like Marilyn Monroe.
But there was definitely a stone in the chapel wall here at Ferniebank inscribed Henricus, Henry. The adie could be Orcadie, Latin for Orkney, and the naut probably was nauta, navigator. Maybe that was a memorial to the sailor Henry, who had died about 1400, perhaps even in America. The William who built Rosslyn and rebuilt Ferniebank was that Henry’s grandson, after all. Cool!
While she had the connection, she checked her e-mail, then surfed to her favorite discussion group at The One Ring.Net, which had, as its banner phrased it, served Middle-Earth since the First Age and was the haunt of Tolkien geeks of the darkest dye. For a while she was lost in the erudite essays and clever jokes. Then she realized she was tying up the phone line and disconnected. Constable Logan or Inspector Delaney might try to get through to this number rather than to Alasdair’s cell phone.
Speaking of her partner, sparring or otherwise, maybe she should make a cup of tea and take it out to him, as a, well, a detente offering. Jean stood up and looked out of the window just as Alasdair emerged from the shop, sipping a canned drink. Okay, he was self-sufficient, she got the idea. She was self-sufficient, too, darn it. With her own interests and her own work. She picked up the Ancient Monuments book from the windowsill and leafed through it. Great Scot readers enjoyed archaeology articles. She could use the story of Isabel, the Gray Lady, as a hook.
The book opened with a note of appreciation to Angus and Araminta Rutherford and Wallace Rutherford, and mentioned Gerald Rutherford’s amateur excavations of 1912. No surprise there. Gentleman—and sometimes lady—archaeologists had left their fingerprints all over British antiquity, for better and for worse.
The next page listed the participants in the chapel dig, among them Valerie Trotter, in her student, prematernal days, no doubt. The head of the dig had been one Donald McSporran, an elderly, more tolerated than respected, faculty member at the University of St. Andrews—or so Jean remembered from writing his obituary soon after she arrived in Scotland. She turned to the body of the book.
As usual, Alasdair was right. The text was heavy going, consisting of blocks of fine print cut with tables of arcana such as pollen analysis and the chemical composition of plaster and paint. The drawings, while exquisitely detailed, were of pottery shards and masonry details, not the sort of thing that would wow a mass audience. . . . Aha—a photo of the chapel stripped of its flooring to reveal the honeycomb of crypts beneath was titillatingly macabre, with chalky bits of bone peeking out from collapsed coffins. Jean saw no armored skeletons, although there was a close-up of one that had been hacked and sliced by various bladed weapons. That, she thought with a shudder, was what Mary’s secretary Riccio looked like. The illustration was helpfully labeled “Plate 5.”
She was squinting at the diminutive columns of the index when the electronic notes of “Ode to Joy” made her jump.
Closing the book and leaving it on the coffee table, she pulled her phone out of her bag. Hugh Munro. All right! A dose of sanity! “Hi Hugh,” she said.
“Hullo, Jean,” Hugh replied, his voice underlaid by snatches of melody played on a keyboard and the wail and squawk of inflating bagpipes. “We’re on stage in half a sec, but I knew you’d want to hear the latest turn-up in the adventure of the clarsach, as conveyed by my pal Dominic.”
“He’s the musical instrument expert, right? Oh yes, please. Minty said she was having it, well, conveyed to Edinburgh.”
“She did that, a first-class seat for Dominic and one for the harp. He went along to the conservator’s lab, and you’ll never guess what they found.”
“My capacity for wild guesses is a little strained right now.”
With a sympathetic chuckle, Hugh said, “Many clarsachs had cavities in the post at the back—traveling minstrels kept a change of clothes tucked away inside. But this one has a small hole inside the front brace, hidden beneath a bittie carving. Inside’s a scrap of paper that looks to be sixteenth century, with an ink mark or two. But it’s stuck fast. They’ll need all their dental picks and whatnot to remove and read what’s on it.”
“Sixteenth century? A time of grand confusion and conflict, with the Reformation drawing blood, and Mary Stuart escaping to England, and Isabel’s family supporting her, and the Borders a war zone—just the sort of setting for secret messages, right?”
“Folk were always carrying musical instruments to and fro, a smuggler’s delight . . . Coming! Must run, Jean, sorry.”
“Thanks for letting me know. Break a fing—er—good luck with the show.”
Whoa, she thought. Had the harp-thief dismantled it looking for the message? Did he find it? Had he pulled out most of it and left a scrap behind? How did he know to look for it? And who was he—or she—anyway? Plopping herself down in the desk chair, Jean punched the Campbell-Reid’s cell phone number.
Michael answered, “Reiver’s Rest, Villain’s Villa, Thieve’s, erm, ah . . . Never mind. You have news for us about the inscription, Jean?”
“Not the inscription, the clarsach, which is in Edinburgh already.” Her words falling over each other, Jean explained the situation and concluded, “Could you call up the museum and find out what’s going on with the paper scrap?”
“Try and stop me. The documents boffins will be dancing a springle-ring!” As the connection evaporated, Jean heard Michael calling, “Eh! Rebecca! You’ll never . . .”
Jean put her phone down and stared blankly at the clock on the desk. The harp could be—would be—repaired, but the fingers that had played it, that had tucked a secret message inside it, were forever lost.
At least when it came to writing articles about Ferniebank she was spoiled for choice. She opened both her word-processing program and the folder labeled, “Ferniebank Conference and Healing Centre. Getting in Touch with the Secret Wisdom of the Past.”
As she’d dimly noted earlier, Keith and Ciara had resisted the temptation to indulge in stunt architecture. The white-painted and slate-roofed building designed to sit above the river both evoked and simplified traditional style. The ruins of the chapel would be the centerpiece of a sort of cloister garden. The new structure didn’t even carve out much landscape, since the landscape itself was marketable. The castle, though, would retain only enough of its structural members and architectural features to allude to that quality beloved of advertisers, authenticity. Would that deprive the ghost of her haunt, or would she still walk, for those who had eyes to see and hearts to know?
Jean pulled out a brochure advertising Cookery at the Glebe, including sample menus and recipes. Another piece of paper was folded in quarters—ah, a map of the Borders, with an arrow pointing to Ferniebank and . . . Oh good grief. Ciara wasn’t just waltzing with history, she was break-dancing with it.
Lines were superimposed on the map the way lines were superimposed on Wallace’s drawing of the gravestone. Except here the lines joined dots indicating towns and other sites into triangles, spears, and crescents, with cryptic notations such as “The Rose Line” and “The Harp.” In other words, Ciara was trading on the—theory, notion, illusion—of sacred geometry, the exceedingly creative concept that human-built locations were arranged in patterns of occult significance. The fact that in an area as densely and lengthily populated as Western Europe you could find enough sites to draw Mickey Mouse mattered not to the true believer. Secret wisdom was very much in the eye of the beholder.
Jean started to fold the map but was stopped by the words at the bottom: “Courtesy of W.B. Rutherford.” Again Wallace . . . That’s what he was doing on the roof with the telescope, plotting sites as well as stargazing. Had he breathed in so much mold and mildew at Ferniebank he’d completely lost track of the dividing line between fact and fiction?
No. That wasn’t fair. The Orkney-Rosslyn-Ferniebank nexus had some perfectly genuine plot points. Or points to be plotted, as the case might be. As for the Templars and harps carrying secret messages, well, it was all highly entertaining, the same way making constellations out of the random distribution of stars was entertaining. Wallace and Ciara’s great minds thought alike, it seemed. What had Ciara said about her confederate? A shame Wallace will not be here to see the final designs? Or the final profits, Jean amended. Angus and Minty would see them, though.
Miranda would get a kick out of all this. And it was time to check in with her anyway, before events got completely out of hand. Although, with the return of not only the clarsach but also Angus, officially or otherwise, the inscription was the only identifiable crime. Everything else was innuendo at best. Or at worst. Jean picked up her phone.
And reached Miranda’s voice mail. It was either tea time or happy hour in Edinburgh. Jean dutifully left a message. “Hi, it’s me, reporting in. Minty’s luncheon was something else again, lots of dishes made from, wait for it, haggis. Pretty good, though. And in more serious news, an important grave inscription’s been stolen from the chapel. Yes, an inscription, chiseled out and carried away. No, Alasdair’s not happy. You’ve heard that the Ferniebank Clarsach’s been recovered, I bet, with more news to come. And . . .” She grimaced. No help for it. “Brace yourself for this one. It turns out that Ciara Macquarrie is Alasdair’s ex-wife. But everything’s okay. Enjoy the Tattoo or wherever you are tonight, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Wondering if her tone had been much too cheerful, even careless—not that tone necessarily came across on the telephone—Jean pushed “end.” But in neither public nor personal matters should she be spilling her guts. Figuratively, she told her gurgling stomach.
The small clock on the desk read 5:45. She made a cup of ginger tea, and drank it while looking out of the front window. The day was darkening, she saw, as the clouds swelled and thickened. Cars came and went. People roamed around. Alasdair walked a group to the castle doorway and another to the chapel path, no doubt explaining about the unfortunate incident of the inscription, and let that be a lesson to us on the protection of historical and cultural resources. Most of the time he was out of sight in the shop.
Jean pressed her nose to the glass. That scrawny, blond, crew-cut woman heading down to the chapel had to be Valerie Trotter, braving whatever she meant by Isabel’s curse. What? Had Logan given her and Derek such a hard time she wanted to check out the scene of the crime for herself? Again—she’d been on the excavation team.
The phone on the desk blurted a double beep. By the time Jean had her hand on the receiver, she realized it wasn’t going to ring again. Alasdair must have picked up the extension in the shop. She hoped it was good news, something that would cool the anger and fear she’d seen bubbling up from his underground magma pools . . . Time had already done that. And guilt as well, probably, about snapping at her as much as about losing the inscription.
A small plate dusted with crumbs indicated that he had had lunch. She could go ahead and cook something for dinner, then, something that did not involve beaks and black feathers but did involve fowl. Chicken soup. That was supposed to be good for what ailed you.
Jean found her painfully assembled recipes and starting slicing and dicing vegetables, very carefully, for the knife was dull. Minty would have been horrified—not that Polly hadn’t proved that you could slice yourself just fine with a sharp knife. A tickle at her ankle was Dougie, roused from his nap by the smell of cooking chicken. Yeah, to a dog you’re part of the family. To a cat, you’re staff. Jean forked over a shred or two.
By the time she started the pot simmering, it was past six-thirty. The clouds were now thick gray roils like bales of wool, blocking the sunlight and sucking the color out of the landscape. Turning on the lights in the living room, she added a row of stitches to the sweater she was knitting for Alasdair while the raucous laugh track of an American sitcom tried to bludgeon her into believing that a couple insulting each other was funny.
At last it was seven-thirty. Jean hiked up the burner beneath the pot of soup and set the table. Then, taking a deep breath, she stepped out into the premature dusk.