Paying the Piper

by Sharyn McCrumb

  They reached Edinburgh on a rainy Friday evening—in time for tea, a salmon salad prepared by Cameron's mother in honor of the American visitor who might turn out to be someone "significant." Elizabeth smiled prettily and tried not to feel like Wallis Simpson.

  Cameron's younger brother Ian had come home from the University of Strathclyde for the weekend, and he spent a good bit of time trying to convince Elizabeth to attend the

  Commonwealth Games. The fact that the Queen might be there was an alluring prospect, but in the end Elizabeth decided that even flesh-and-blood royalty could not tempt her into sitting through a "special Olympics for British subjects," as she put it.

  "Elizabeth doesn't like anything that hasn't been dead a hundred years," Cameron told his brother.

  "Well, that explains her attraction to you." Ian smirked.

  During the ensuing pillow fight, Elizabeth helped Margaret Dawson with the washing up.

  The next morning was cloudy, but not actually raining—a typical British summer day, Elizabeth had learned. Cameron had promised her a full day's tour of the city, but he explained that he had a few errands to attend to first, and Elizabeth had gamely agreed to accompany him.

  "We'll get to the castle, I promise you. I shouldn't be much longer here. What time is your meeting this afternoon?"

  "Three o'clock," said Elizabeth, consulting her watch. "I don't suppose we'll have time for the museum as well?"

  No reply was forthcoming. By that time the salesman had unearthed another catalogue, and he and Cameron were rooting through it happily, talking about master cylinders and oil seals.

  Oil seals. That was what threw her. When Cameron, the marine biologist, had announced that he wanted to consult Halfords about oil seals, before they went sightseeing, she had assumed it had to do with his research, and naturally she had agreed. Halfords, she thought, must be some sort of aquarium or research station on the Firth of Forth, and she looked forward to watching the seals cavorting about in the water, or, failing that, she could at least view the other exhibits while Cameron made his inquiries.

  She spent the first few minutes of the drive enjoying the scenery and studying the houses and gardens, so that they were several miles along before she brought up the subject of the trip. "Is this a new research project, then?"

  "What?" said Cameron.

  "This Halfords trip. Are you studying the effects of North Sea oil drilling on the seals?"

  Cameron had found that so amusing that he had repeated it to the clerk, the cashier, and to two other customers in Halfords—which turned out to be an auto-parts store. After his performance on the Ml, she should have known; but somehow she hadn't thought of British men as being car-crazed. Horses, perhaps. That would have fit in with her God-is-an-Englishman view of the species, but somehow an obsession with batteries and spark plugs lacked the aura of romance that she associated with tweeds and spaniels.

  She didn't complain, though. She sat down at the catalogue table in the corner and wrote postcards while Cameron blethered on about his car troubles. Perhaps she had romanticized him a bit, she thought. "Built him a soul," as Dorothy Parker had phrased it. But after all, it did seem to fit rather nicely. And even carburetors had a certain charm when they were discussed in a cultured Scottish accent.

  Elizabeth smiled sweetly at Halfords in general. Everything was romantic in Britain.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The National Museum of Antiquities, on Edinburgh's Queen Street, across from Scotland's National Portrait Gallery, was to be the setting for the first meeting of the archaeologists working on the Banrigh project. The museum's principal exhibit at the moment was "I Am Come Home," a tribute to Charles Edward Stuart that featured some of the Bonnie Prince's own personal possessions, including his silver mess kit for "roughing it.'' With the possible exception of the American members of the expedition, everyone would give that room a miss in favor of the more ancient relics of Scotland.

  Derek Marchand had arrived early for the dig's organizational meeting because he believed in being punctual. After he had checked out the meeting room upstairs, he had gone back to the first floor of the museum to have a look around while he organized his thoughts.

  The St. Ninian's Isle treasure was popular, as usual. Crowds of people were milling about the glass cases looking at the silver bowls and penannular Pictish brooches that had been found on Shetland in the 1950s. A professor from Aberdeen University had been excavating on the small island to locate and plan the medieval church that had once stood there. A schoolboy volunteer on the dig had turned over a broken stone in what had been the nave of the church and had found the larchwood box containing treasure: twenty-eight decorated silver objects—and the jawbone of a porpoise. No doubt the Picts had hidden their valuables beneath the church floor during a Viking raid and had never reclaimed the box.

  Marchand smiled. This was most people's idea of archaeology: finding heavily carved silver jewelry stashed away in the earth. He had been a schoolboy himself when Howard Carter found even gaudier treasure in the grave of Tutankhamen in Egypt. Perhaps that story had awakened his own passion for archaeology. If so, he had long outgrown such romantic notions. Now, as a man of seventy, choosing archaeology as the avocation of his retirement, he preferred knowledge to trinkets. A few handfuls of wood ash or a trowel of bone fragments could offer more information than a trunkful of silver-gilt brooches. He was no longer interested in treasure troves.

  Marchand bent over a case containing stone axes and flint microliths. The tools of ancient Britain still fascinated him, and made him feel a kinship with those early engineers, perhaps more so than with their modern counterparts. Having served with the Royal Corps of Engineers in World War II, Marchand knew what it meant to accommodate your structures to nature, just as the old ones did. These days young civil engineers had the money and the technology to change the environment to suit their needs: level the mountain, divert the river. They hadn't done it that way in Greece in 1943. The war had deprived them or the luxury or time and technology. They d had three days to build a bridge, and they had to put it where nature would permit. Yes, he understood the Celts: using makeshift tools to negotiate a truce with the elements. He admired them for it.

  He rather thought he might resemble one of tie ancient Celts. He was just over five feet seven but still fit, and with a mane of silvery hair, a bit thin on top. He didn't suppose many of them had lived as long as he had; seventy was nearly double the life expectancy in prehistoric Britain. Still, he felt it would have been a good time to live. He could think of few things in the twentieth century that he would miss. Certainly not telephones, automobiles, or television sets. He was pleased that the dig site would have none of those modern inconveniences. Their absence would make him feel closer to the ancient builders; perhaps it would bring them luck.

  Because the Scottish Museum had been closer to Buckingham Terrace than he'd expected, Owen Gilchrist was twenty minutes early for the organizational meeting of the Banrigh dig. If he hadn't been carrying camera equipment, he would have walked instead of taking a cab, but he had wanted to photograph the house. Owen wished he'd had the nerve to go up and knock on the door, but the place was obviously a private home, and perhaps its occupants didn't even know that a murder had been committed mere fifty years" ago. Owen knew—because his hobby was murder.

  In 1926 the sandstone row house had been home to John Donald Merrett, an Edinburgh University student who had shot and killed his mother—one of the few matricides ever recorded in Scotland. The facade of the house seemed unchanged from the photographs Owen had seen in his crime books. He wondered about the interior, but he was too shy to seek admittance.

  The infamous Merrett house was not listed in any of the cheery paperback guidebooks Owen had purchased back in Ohio to prepare for his summer in Scotland; all of them recommended the conventional fare for visitor: the castle, the Royal Mile, and the art gallery. Owen's taste in tourism was quite different, but fortunately he
was well versed in his specialty and needed no assistance other than the city maps provided by less sanguine guidebook writers.

  Owen had spent the three days before the start of the dig in an absolute orgy of crime—all vicariously experienced, that is. He had paid his respects to the skeleton of Burke the Body Snatcher, on display at the Royal College of Surgeons, and on a side trip to Sir Walter Scott's home at Abbotsford he insisted upon seeing the bit of Burke's tanned flesh that Scott supposedly kept in a stamp box. (The grandmotherly guide had disavowed all knowledge of such a barbarity in strangled tones suggesting that she wouldn't mind having Owen similarly displayed with a placard reading: touristus americanus.)

  He had had lunch in Deacon Brodie's Tavern, a pub named after the original model for Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and he had toured Edinburgh's famous old prison, the Tollbooth, happily reminiscing about the Porteous Riot and the Heart of Midlothian executions.

  Owen Gilchrist knew that his hobby was a bit unusual, but he did not consider himself at all strange. Scores of people his age and younger went to "dead teenager" movies, sitting through an evening of axe murders or chainsaw massacres in living color, and no one seemed to worry about their mental health. He, by contrast, simply combined the adolescent fascination with gore with an interest in history; to him the stories were the more exciting for being true.

  Owen Gilchrist didn't encounter much excitement in the ordinary course of his life. Owen, who had been accused of being born middle-aged, was having a sedate time at college, with none of the wild parties and romantic escapades experienced by college students in films. He was a pudgy, bespectacled teddy bear to whom sex was still a branch of philosophy, and his major in anthropology suggested an interest in people that was as impersonal in his private life as it was in his course work. His acquaintances considered him timid and a trifle immature, and so he was; but he could be quite merciless when tracking a serial killer through the pages of a true-crime biography. He had studied all the major murderers of the twentieth century, and he would go on about "Ted" or "Ian and Myra" as if they were his dearest friends. Perhaps they were. Certainly they provided him with more entertainment and less hassle than those he met in his everyday existence. Sometimes he imagined the jock types in his dorm being dismembered by a crazed psychopath, or an unattainable sorority member bound, gagged, and terrified in a lantern-lit cellar, awaiting the pleasure of Owen-the-Ripper. But he wouldn't actually do it "in real life"; dear me, no. It was a harmless form of fantasy; Owen was always unfailingly polite to his college classmates. He must have lost a dozen pens a month because he was too shy to ask for the return of them. His fantasies, though, were his own business.

  He hoped that the archaeological dig would provide a bit of ghoulish excitement. Surely they would find a few skeletons in the course of the excavation. Owen had read about the bog people, a prehistoric Norse tribe that had left ritually throttled sacrifices in tannin bogs, so perfectly preserved by the natural acids that, twenty centuries later, they were mistaken for recent murder victims. If there were any bogs on the isle of Banrigh, Owen would certainly search them. If not, perhaps the standing stones would yield a few bony offerings to the sun god; he heard of similar finds at Stonehenge in the south.

  As inoffensive as Owen was, he had recently adopted one antisocial habit that he planned to perfect during the course of the dig. He hoped no one would object, but he vowed to make no concessions on this point to his fellow diggers. Owen had every intention of continuing his self-taught bagpipe lessons.

  Gitte Dankert looked at her watch for the third time in as many minutes. "Please finish your salad, Alasdair," she urged. "You are going to make us late for the meeting."

  Her companion, interrupted in a tale about his anatomy lecturer, scowled and set down his fork. "Don't be so bloody punctual! I suppose the trains run on time in Denmark?"

  "We always try to arrive on schedule for a meeting," Gitte said seriously.

  "Don't worry about it. I'm the medical man for the expedition, so I needn't follow all the petty little rules set down for the ditchdiggers."

  "But, Alasdair, I'm one of those ditchdiggers," she said softly.

  "Nonsense! You're with me. Don't take offense, love." He yanked one strand of her mousy fringe, and then he went back to his salad, spearing forkfuls of bean sprouts and nuts in the same leisurely fashion as before.

  Gitte sighed, resigning herself to being late for the meeting. If she continued to press the point, they would only be that much later. She knew these moods of Alasdair's. He could be quite charming when he wanted, but his opinion of himself was very high. Her fiat-mates joked that he acted as if M.D. stood for medical deity, and they warned her that if he was this difficult as a third-year student, he would only become worse as he came closer to qualifying.

  Gitte suspected that they were right, but she didn't seem to be able to help herself. When Alasdair was rude to everyone else but nice to her, she felt very special and privileged, and when he was brusque with her, it made her try all the harder to win his approval. She supposed she loved him—the fact that he was not particularly good-looking or passionate made her feel virtuous in her affection. Surely it could not be mere animal magnetism if he were so drab and serious; surely only true love would kindle with so little fuel. She wondered at times how he felt about her. She was not very pretty, with her dull brown hair and lashless green eyes, but she was small and thin and twenty-two, which counted for beauty in the everyday world. There was always an offer or two to buy her a shandy at the pub, and Alasdair seemed gratified by that, as if being her escort allowed him pride of ownership. But she wondered if that attractiveness counted enough—for a serious relationship, that is. "Buy British" seemed to apply to more than manufactured goods; often she felt that being a Dane made her somehow "not quite the article,'' a favorite expression of Alasdair's. Perhaps it explained the drink offers as well. Danes seemed to have earned a reputation for sexual liberation that Gitte did not live up to at all, but fortunately Alasdair did not seem to mind her shyness. He was a bit of a prude himself.

  She had never met his family. He said he was estranged from them, but she wondered if that could be an excuse. Still, she knew that he wasn't seeing anyone else, and she supposed that being taken for granted could be interpreted as a kind of devotion.

  British men were quite undemonstrative, and she thought that perhaps the language barrier could keep her from understanding the nuances of their relationship. It is one thing to be able to understand university courses taught in English, but quite another to pick up the shades of meaning in private life. Of course, Alasdair did not speak Danish, except for the simplest and most anglicized words, like farvel, for goodbye. He assumed that she would accommodate him—at great advantage to herself, he thought—by learning perfect English.

  Sometimes Gitte bristled at her lover's condescending attitude toward her heritage, but mostly she didn't. If he thought himself such an altogether superior person, perhaps it was true, and in that case she was very lucky to have him.

  She was pleased that he had asked her to go along on the archaeological dig. He would have gone without her, of course, and he hadn't consulted her about it beforehand, but at least he had permitted her to accompany him. She told herself that Alasdair was a lonely and troubled person, and that if only she loved him enough, all would be well.

  Tom Leath rather liked Edinburgh, It was less crowded and noisy than his usual haunts in a suburb of London. He liked the look of the castle perched there over everything, never letting you forget for a moment that you were treading on history at every turn. He thought he might like to get assigned to a dig there sometime, perhaps more excavations of the Roman fort at Cramond. It was a yacht basin now, quite a picturesque village of whitewashed stone houses and a bit of nark overlooking the River Almond and the Firth of Forth. Trust the Romans to take the best property around.

  Of course, the night life in Edinburgh was nil—not only compared to London; prob
ably compared to downtown Brighton. What did you bloody do in Edinburgh after dark if you were under forty and on your own?

  It would be good practice for the Isle of Banrigh, though. Dead deserted, that was, and not even any electricity for the telly. He'd bought a few bottles of moderately priced Scotch to take over in his rucksack; perhaps some of the other diggers would be sociable types, and they could have a camp fire after work and pass round the old bottle. He expected it to be cold and drizzling on Banrigh, summer or not; the Scottish islands were all the same, climates like basements. Leath thought, not for the first time, that being a specialist in Celtic culture could have its drawbacks. Had he specialized in Greek archaeology, he could be lounging on Delos right now, acquiring a healthy tan along with the potsherds.

  Marchand should be all right as head of the expedition. He was ex-army. He'd be all right in terms of leniency, that is, toward the odd bit of drinking or high spirits. Leath wasn't so sure about his being all right in terms of archaeology, though. After all, the man was an engineer, and he wasn't much of an expert on Celtic culture in general—just that one bee in his bonnet about the standing stones.

  Leath thought of Heinrich Schliemann, who troweled through half a dozen cities and threw the remains of Troy on the scrap heap because he thought that it should be a few meters deeper in the earth. Archaeology had tried to become more of a science since those days, but there were still enough contract archaeologists around to create problems. He'd heard of one extraordinary fellow in Wyoming in the United States who used the local Indian ruins to provide a sort of dude ranch for scholarly minded tourists. He had built a dormitory and conference center, and he charged people hefty sums to go and paw about in the foothills, pretending to be archaeologists. Probably made a fortune; Learn hoped there hadn't been anything there for him to destroy. If the world was lucky, the bugger was a complete crook who seeded the earth with newly made arrowheads before each new wave of diggers.