The Ruby Tear

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  This was the story Nick told in his play.

  And all that ominous talk about enemies, mysterious deaths in his family—she put her rioting imagination firmly on hold and resolved to ask Lily Anderson directly about Ivo Craggen as soon as she got the chance. Why had Nick cast Ivo, in his mind, as the vengeful force attacking the family with its treasured emerald in “The Jewel”?

  Prudence dictated that she speak with Lily anyway. One of the worst things you could do was to allow jealousy to divide the members of a working company. Enough divisive currents arose spontaneously as it was, even when people were trying their best to avoid them.

  And here she had been more or less allowing Lily’s contact, this attractive European with his seductively esoteric knowledge of ancient, beautiful, terrible things, to pay court to her. How could she have fallen into what was now a relationship, of sorts, with him? What in the world was she thinking of?

  Of Nick, of course.

  Missing Nick, being angry with Nick, wanting to show that she didn’t need Nick; that she could ace the part of Eva, and find some other man, maybe a younger, better man, to take his place at her side, at least for a while. Being in a show often created a sort of moral time-out; inside the bubble of the production, liaisons could form, mature, and end without any lasting effects afterward.

  Was that what she was doing, allowing this stranger to escort her around town, whisper in her ear, kiss her hand, kiss her lips, for God’s sake?

  Well, why not? Handsome, charming, mysterious stranger plus actress recovering from car crash whose ex-fiancé will barely talk to her: is that a set-up for a painful affair that everybody will regret later, or isn’t it?

  It was almost funny, but there was something sinister in the mix, too—now that she actually looked: the peculiar symmetry between the things she was hearing from Ivo Craggen and the things she’d heard from Nick. It was eerie; and she didn’t like it.

  Although it was very intriguing, too. Exciting, even.

  Well, talking to Lily would bring it all down to earth, she was sure.

  But the next day Lily didn’t show up. It wasn’t her child who was sick this time, it was Lily herself, which was unusual, according to Marie. Lily was known to have the constitution of a tough little pony, she said, and this attack of anemia had come on very suddenly. It was a relief when Lily showed up two days later.

  Jess found the designer seated in her high swivel chair, working over her light box on a large piece of tracing paper, with smooth, careful strokes.

  Lily looked pale, with big circles under her eyes, but she greeted Jess brightly enough. “For the scrim,” she said. “What do you think?”

  Looking over her shoulder, Jess saw that the tracing was of a water color of a bracelet of flat golden rectangles, each joined to its neighbors with solid links. The piece looked weighty and slightly crude, with large gemstones drawn in the center of each plaque, set with smaller stones in a sunburst pattern.

  “Beautiful. It looks like a real historic piece,” Jess said.

  “Well, it better not be,” Lily said. “It should be a composite, so we don’t get hit with some kind of permissions problem for using the image of an actual object. I made that very clear to my—consultant.”

  Ah; her consultant.

  “Ivo Craggen gave you the original painting?” Jess said with what she hoped came across merely as casual curiosity. “He said he’s been making suggestions.”

  “Yup. He’s been very helpful. And while we’re on the subject, let’s get something out of the way between us. I know Ivo is interested in you, Jess. I saw the two of you go into the jewelry show together the other day. I’d gone again myself; professional interest.”

  She pushed the rolling chair back from her work table, set down her pen and swiveled to face Jess. “Now, I know better than anyone that I’m not exactly a fashion model—wait, let me finish, okay?”

  Jessamyn swallowed her protestations. Lily was small and plump, with a slightly outsized head, so that if you focused on her proportions, you might wonder about an element of dwarfism in her parentage. For the most part, everyone ignored this and pretty much forgot it, but now Lily was deliberately drawing attention to her unusual looks.

  Jess flashed on how vulnerable she herself had felt after the bandages first came off, and she flinched inwardly. Lily’s situation was entirely different, but Jess wished she didn’t have to have this conversation.

  “Sure, Lily,” she said, and waited.

  “To put it bluntly, I don’t compete with the cast for partners. If somebody shows an interest and I’m interested too, well, great. I’ll go along as long as it stays fun for me. Maybe more than just fun, but for maybe less than a lifetime, you know?

  “But if a guy starts to cool and look at somebody else—hard not to do, in a business which sets beauty on a very high pedestal—when I see that happening, it’s no big deal for me. I don’t like a fuss, and anyway you don’t want to win a fight and end up with something you didn’t really want. There are some European attitudes that are only pleasing when you know you can walk away when you want to.”

  She smiled, and Jess felt the disconcerted expression on her own face relaxing.

  “It’s also principle,” Lily added. “I think everybody should have as much freedom as possible when it comes to the needs of their heart, you know what I mean? So if he’s interested—and it sure looks like Ivo is—and you’re interested too, then go for it, and good luck to you both. He and I have kept it casual.”

  “God, Lily—can I hug you? You’re somebody special, and I’d love having some of that rub off on me.”

  “You’re doing fine yourself,” Lily said lightly. Then she added in a more sober tone, “I don’t talk this frankly with everybody, especially actors. You know how shockingly fragile so many of them are, under all that flash and swagger.”

  “I do,” Jess said. “A profession that nurtures vulnerability as a working tool isn’t for everybody.”

  But Lily, turning back to her light box work, had moved on. She said, seemingly as an afterthought, “What I mean is, I’d keep on your toes with Ivo, if I were you. There’s something . . .” She picked up her pen again, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s just that he’s a foreigner.”

  “What do you mean?” Jess asked.

  The designer shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m just thrumming with slightly psychic nervous-vibes, that’s all. It happens once in a while, but you can’t live your life by that, can you? Pay no attention to what I said.”

  Easier said than done, Jess thought. Easier said than done.

  Legends

  Nick walked in a graveyard, hunching his coat collar higher on his neck. The morning was raw and foggy. Fresh-looking mounds had been squeezed in among the older plots, decorated with plastic flowers. People here didn’t splurge on real ones, since someone might come steal the day’s tribute of flowers to resell; he had seen it happen in other towns.

  He stumbled over a crumbling headstone and the shock jarred a curse out of him.

  “Swearing in a graveyard,” someone remarked in a gravelly voice; “it’s bad luck, even for foreigners.”

  The figure darkening in the filmy fog resolved itself into a bent-looking man with a cane wearing a huge overcoat and a long scarf doubled around his throat with its ends flapping in the wet wind. From under his cap’s visor he studied Nick with gleaming eyes set deep in nested wrinkles.

  “Excuse me,” Nick said. “I thought I was alone.”

  “Alone, here?” the old man said, indicating the field of chipped and discolored markers with a roll of his eyes. “This is the biggest crowd in town, and the liveliest too. In the worst of the fighting, so many bodies were buried in backyards, in empty lots and behind sheds; they must be taken up again and put here. Public health, you know. We know we have public health because this week we can bury our dead on an open hillside without being picked off by snipers in the hills as we stand over the grave. Tomorrow, who know
s?”

  “I’m sorry,” Nick said. Even with the war years behind him now, he said that a lot, here.

  “Sorry for what?” the old man said. “It was nothing to do with you, was it? No, no, for years on end, it was nothing to do with you. So why do you come now?” He peered more closely at Nick. “You’re Mr. Griffin, from America, I hear. A long way to come. You’re here to find out about relatives, ancestors, people dead a long, long time already? Lucky ones.”

  Irritated by the old man’s tone, Nick said sharply, “I don’t see you cutting your own throat to join those ‘lucky ones.’ And you dodged bullets as smartly as everybody else who survived, or you wouldn’t be here now.”

  “What would you know about it?” the old man muttered, looking gloomily back toward the town, a small place well out of the way of the brunt of the fighting to the south.

  “You know my name,” Nick said. “I don’t know yours.”

  “What do you care what my name is?”

  “I’m trying to be civil.”

  The old man shot him a fierce look. “You choose a strange time to come searching for your ‘roots,’ young man.”

  “I’m a journalist,” Nick said. “I’m trying to run down some old stories as part of a fictional family story, something to help my readers get a sense of the long history of wars and grudges in these countries.”

  “Oh,” the old man said. “A family saga, like Gone With The Wind?”

  “Nothing so romantic; just an effort to throw a little light on things, maybe, for other outsiders like myself.”

  “So who are you looking for? What family name?”

  “Von Craggen.”

  The old man gazed at Nick without speaking, his expression suddenly blank. Without a word, he began walking away down one of the aisles between the graves.

  He wasn’t the first local to have turned their back on Nick when that name came up. Nick hadn’t expected to meet anyone out here this morning. He had nothing with him to offer, no bribe for something besides silence. He stared helplessly after the old man, silently cursing his own lack of forethought.

  Cursing in a graveyard; bad luck anywhere.

  The old man looked back over his shoulder. “Are you coming? It’s this way.”

  Nick followed. They came to a low tumble of cracked stones almost overgrown with weeds. There were no graves here, although the rest of the cemetery was crowded with monuments. Above this lone building leaned a single tree, thick and crooked. It reminded Nick uncomfortably of the oak at the junction of the shortcut outside Rhinebeck.

  “That’s it,” the old man said, swinging his stick out in an arc at the heap of rocks. “They say that under there lie the dust and bones of an ancient but long extinguished line of Frankish barons, the von Craggens. Catholics, sent to stamp out pagans and heretics and hold off incursions by Turks and barbarians.

  “There was a castle, up above. Nothing left of it now, if it ever really stood in the first place. They were off to war every fighting season, those barons.”

  Nick had gone looking and found nothing but a few hollow-worn steps that led nowhere but up to empty sky.

  “Of course we’re so much more civilized now,” the old man added, looking down meditatively at his muddy shoes.

  “We are,” Nick agreed. “We do our killing from further away.”

  “They were Christians,” the old man murmured, “those men of Craggenheim. I am Muslim, myself.”

  “"So what are you doing here in a Christian graveyard?” Nick said.

  The old man peered at him. “What am I doing here? Following you. I thought perhaps we might talk to our mutual profit.”

  “We might,” Nick said. “What can you tell me about these von Craggens?”

  “They say you already know about the present baron,” the old man replied.

  “Present baron? There are no more barons of that name,” he said. “Didn’t you just tell me that yourself?” This was a fool’s errand, he could feel it already; the old man was jerking him around to see what might fall out of his pockets.

  His leg ached with the damp and he was starting to feel hungry. The man propped his hips against the lip of the tomb, planting the tip of his cane between his feet.

  “Someone goes about with the name nowadays, doing business here and there, buying and selling. Well, there are plenty of people who are glad to see him, I suppose. At least he doesn’t blow your house up when he has to hand it back to you again, just to keep you from having any use of it, like the Chetnicks did when they left. That’s a recommendation these days.”

  Buying and selling; had that filigree pendant and earrings come from here?

  “You’re saying this man has no right to the name, or the title? People’s status can change in wartime.”

  “The barons once held the whole valley,” the old man said, lifting his chin to indicate thinly forested land now patched with snow and mud and obscured by drifting fog. “And two more besides, after one very successful campaign. There’s always been fighting around here. Plows still bring up bones from before the last big war, and next spring they’ll turn up brand-new bones. A lot of blood swells this soil. People used to say that blood made it fertile, at least so long as some priest or holy man blessed it.”

  “I have to sit down,” Nick said. The old man was meandering, and Nick’s leg was hurting; that would teach him to walk around for too long without his own cane.

  Old bones, he thought; and much newer ones. All over the Balkans he’d seen the officials searching for hidden graves, mass graves, walking slowly along and driving thin metal rods deep into the damp ground, then pulling them out and sniffed the ends for the reek of rotting flesh. Charnel work.

  “You’re tired? A young man like you with years of good meals packed onto his bones?” the old man asked, eyeing him up and down.

  Nick said patiently, “I have an old injury that bothers me sometimes.”

  “Well, don’t sit there,” the old man said with sudden shrillness, jabbing his finger at the great gnarl of tree root that Nick was about to settle on, under the single tree. “I thought you knew better! Why do you think that tree is still standing, when everything else of any size was long ago cut down to burn in winter?”‘

  “Too far from the village,” Nick said, sitting anyway, “and too exposed to enemy fire during the war?”

  The old man sighed and came to sit on the root by Nick, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them.

  “We could break off some low branches and make a fire,” he said wistfully, “except it would bring bad luck, and we don’t want to risk that, not with all the good luck we already bask in around here. But we can imagine a fire. Are you up to that? I can’t do it for both of us.”

  “Is there a story about this tree?”

  “Yes.” Up close, the old man was odorous, mostly of wood smoke. “The kind of story most people want forgotten. But what harm can it do for an old man to rest here a moment and talk about old days? What else is an old man good for?”

  In this remark and in the old man’s bleak eyes Nick read the guilt of still being alive when so many children were dead, so many strong young men and women, so many more robust and promising souls. Yet here he still was, alive if not thriving.

  Nick said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

  After a moment the old man began quietly, “Once, in the time of the Romans and before the Franks, there were older gods worshipped here. Certain places had special spirits living in them. There was a daemon of this grove—what used to be a grove.

  “She was a thirsty darkness, this daemon, oozed from some deep old crack in the stone of the hills that goes down to the heart of the earth. They say it was the blood of feuds and wars, slipping down that crack, that brought her to the surface, hungering for more.”

  Nick shifted on the thick, warty root, his body suddenly agitated. This was what he had come all this way to hear, he knew it with a sickening certainty.

  The old man
cleared his throat and turned his head politely to spit. “They say dead bodies were buried around here first to appease her appetite. Later on, the ground was sanctified and a church was built over that split in the hillside, but it’s long gone too.

  “Now, this ancient spirit was respected by these northern foreigners, these Frankish barons. They were clever enough to use superstition to help win the support of local people. It’s said they built their family tomb here, under her tree, as a mark of respect for that local spirit. They wouldn’t let the priests cut the other trees down.”

  “A daemon,” Nick said, staring at the discolored stones. “What is that, exactly? You mean some kind of devil out of hell?”

  “From before hell,” the old man said. “Before there was a church or a temple or a mosque here, back when it was all forest with little villages huddled in the valleys. All lands have these daemons, don’t you think? Blood feeds them and makes them strong. Blood draws them, and blood can bind them; or so those old heathen people believed.”

  “You’re telling me,” Nick said slowly, sidling up to it, not wanting to hear but knowing that he must hear, “that such a daemon came to life here? And what happened then?”

  “Nobody knows, it was a long time ago,” the old man said.

  “I told you, I’ll pay,” Nick said harshly. “Tell me what happened!”

  “Nobody knows,” the old man repeated, staring into the fog with a squinting, abstracted gaze that deepened the furrows across his forehead and around his eyes. “But what I’ve heard is that the daemon—she has several names, but I don’t know them and if I did I wouldn’t speak them here—the daemon made a pact with the last baron, when he was dying of some treachery or other—”

  “Wait.” Nick took a breath and asked a question rough with dread: “Was there someone else involved—a foreigner, who did the baron wrong somehow?”

  The old man reared back to look at him with a speculative stare. He said, “It’s an old story, who knows what parts have been lost? It could be as you say. On the other hand, we’ve never needed to import treachery from other places; there’s always more than enough of the home-grown variety to go around in this part of the world.”