“Nope,” said Keith.
“She’s there, right enough. The vibrations were rattling my teeth. How sad that she’s lingering so near a place of power like the chapel, and yet cannot let go. Wallace now, he’s gone on to the next plane.” The motley pair disappeared into the shade of the trees.
Oh, Jean thought. Those gray walls down that way, they were the chapel’s. Those shadows that lay long across the courtyard, they indicated that the day was dying. That man standing beside her, face shielded, eyes impenetrable, that was Alasdair. Her Alasdair. He had expressionlessness down pat, oh yes, but “po-faced” implied arrogance as well. Jean had thought him arrogant, once. What? Had Ciara never broken his shell? Or had she reinforced its thickness?
He wasn’t a po-faced specimen, Jean thought, any more than she was a poor lamb. Mutton, maybe, but then, Ciara wasn’t daubed with any mint jelly herself.
Ciara, that was a pretty name. Not plain-jane, like Jean. The woman was pretty, taller than Jean—which wasn’t saying much, most people were taller than Jean—and pleasingly plump beneath her layers of fabric. She was the sort of woman who lived large, speaking her mind, laughing loudly, enjoying rich food and drink without fearing the sort of dyspepsia Jean felt stirring in the depths of her stomach at that very moment.
No need to do a compare-and-contrast. No need to torture herself with jealousy. Manifestly, Alasdair had moved on. A long way on, to end up with Jean. But speaking of letting go . . . The words came in a rush. “She’s your ex-wife? She’s not what I—I mean I wasn’t expecting anything, the way you’ve avoided talking about her. Why didn’t you tell me?”
The rumble of the tractor stopped and the soundless void was filled by Alasdair’s slightly hoarse voice. “Why should I have told you?”
“Well, it would have made this moment a hell of a lot less awkward!”
He didn’t blink, let alone flinch. He turned his head so that he was facing her. Still his gaze was steady and uncompromising. Even the short-cropped strands of his hair were clenched, like his jaw when he at last squeezed words out between his teeth. “Oh no, lass, there’s nothing could be making this moment less awkward.”
From the road came a whistle, followed by a gruff male voice shouting, “Hector! Jackie! Come down by me.”
Sheep dogs, Jean assumed. Or cattle dogs. Whatever. A whiff of peat smoke tickled her nostrils.
“I knew she’d started up a tour company,” Alasdair went on. “I didn’t know it was her buying the property. Not ’til you said her name. Then I had a look at the small print on P and S’s papers and there it was, several pages in. I’m thinking she meant to surprise me, here.”
“As an attack?”
“As a joke. She’s never vindictive. That would mean taking notice of others.” He turned away. Any other man would have cursed until the air was blue, or thrown his fist through the stone wall, or made it all Jean’s fault. Alasdair said, “Let’s be getting your things into the flat.”
It’s only a flesh wound.
She wanted to reassure him with a hug or a soft word. But to try and scale his defenses right now would make things worse. She turned toward her car. Groceries. Suitcase. Cat. Flat. The cat in the flat. Alasdair pulled the pet taxi from the back seat and returned Dougie’s suspicious gaze through the bars, two males, each sizing up the other.
Ciara’s merry laugh echoed from the woods. Quickly, efficiently, Alasdair strode off toward the apartment inserted into the lower corner of the castle. Jean followed, lugging the cooler.
When he opened the door it glided on oiled hinges, with no horror-movie groans. He placed Dougie’s carrier inside and turned back toward the car, leaving Jean to inspect her temporary home.
Breathing in the odor of cleanser with nuances of frying food, she eyed a kitchen separated by a table and chairs from a living area provided with the usual furnishings. A television sat next to a medieval stone fireplace fitted with an electric fire, across from, Jean was pleased to see, a shelf of books and magazines. A desk held an aging telephone/answering machine combo and an analog clock but was otherwise bare except for a thick padded envelope, addressed to Alasdair from Protect and Survive. His marching orders, no doubt.
Only the fireplace, an original feature, and the two-foot-deep sills of the large and in no way original windows on either side, revealed that the flat was nestled inside the stony exoskeleton of a medieval keep. Judging by the florid wallpaper and fabrics and the air of benign shabbiness, the flat dated to the nineties, when the triple attraction of castle, chapel, and well had been stabilized and opened to sightseers.
Jean set the cooler on the dining table, wondering whether the reading material or anything else in the place had belonged to Wallace Rutherford.
From the far end of the living room, a short hallway led past a bathroom almost large enough to swing a cat in—not that Jean had any intention of doing so—to a bedroom. A double bed, wardrobe, and chest of drawers almost filled the room, but then, togetherness was the point of the exercise, wasn’t it?
The tall bedposts were set against the whitewashed stone wall separating the flat from the main building . . . Don’t start that again, she told herself. There was already a ghost haunting the bedroom, its earrings tinkling.
A large window pierced the wall opposite the bed. Just as from the two big windows in the living room, Jean saw a hillside sloping down to the river, textured with stones, saplings, shrubbery, and bracken resembling giant Boston ferns. Here was the original fernie brae or bank of the castle’s name. Jean remembered the words of Thomas the Rhymer:
And see ye not that bonny road,
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.
Although just because you took the road to Faerie didn’t mean you weren’t as likely to end up in Podunk . . . She was lowering her expectations about Alasdair. Hoping he didn’t expect too much of her. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him. It was, as they’d been reminded a few moments ago, that they had only so much emotional capital to spend trying to assemble a relationship out of two reclamation projects. But then, hoarding their emotional capital meant nothing but bitter loneliness, like Scrooge before that visit from his own ghosts.
Across the stone-punctured and foam-frilled surface of the Teviot stood a belt of trees, the green of their leaves lightly brushed with gold. Beyond them rose a hillside streaked with the purplish-pink of a few late foxgloves. The misshapen shadow of the castle stretched toward the east, where it lay across the water of the river damping its sparkle.
Jean opened the window and leaned out. To her left, beyond the gray flank of the castle and the back of the outbuilding, stood St. Mary’s chapel. Its roofless walls were pierced with arched windows and carved with the weathered shapes of fruits, foliage, human and demonic figures. It rested upon a small rocky prominence that might be either a natural outcrop or a manmade terrace, one that blended into a low-walled courtyard that disappeared in turn into the forested hillside. There a grotto of the same time-stained gray stone marked the site of the ancient holy well. It might have originally been dedicated to the goddesses Kerridwen or Coventina, making the attribution to Mary a simple matter of policy change.
The chapel rose phoenix-like, not from flame but from the stony bones of the earth and the eternal rush of water. No, there was a fire. Or a rippling glint of light behind the broken tracery of a window. Something was reflecting a low sunbeam through the leaves.
Ciara and Keith ambled around the side of the chapel to the terrace. She was burdened by no more than her woven shoulder bag, but he was holding an electronic gadget, probably a camera. He aimed it at the grotto, trying various angles, and fired away.
Ciara considered several plants, collected a flower or two, and gazed over the railing protecting the tumbled slope where one end of the terrace had subsided into the river. Her attitude was that of Juliet on her balcony, gracefully baying at the
moon. But Jean doubted if she was declaiming, “Wherefore art thou Cameron?” Maybe she was pondering bottling the well-water, labeling it with a Celtic-interlace logo, and endorsing it with Mary or some other saint’s name. That would bring a fine old medieval custom into the modern marketplace.
Even as Jean looked, the sun sank below the western hills and the shadow of Ferniebank melted away into the dusk. Exhaling through pursed lips, she headed back into the living room.
Her suitcase was sitting beside Dougie’s cage, and bags of groceries lined the kitchen counter. Alasdair’s footsteps crunched across the gravel, coming back with another load. This time when he stepped inside, he closed the door behind him, with a solid thunk that evoked bolts thrown and drawbridges raised. At least now, Jean thought, I’m hunkered down inside the castle with him instead of standing on the other side of the moat, watching him run his standard up and his guns out. Aren’t I?
Alasdair deposited her knitting bag and laptop case beside the desk. “That’s the lot. Your car needs locking, but I’ve not got the keys.”
“You think Stanelaw’s mini crime wave will get to us out here?” she asked, not entirely joking.
“Hard to say,” he said, with a quick frown that conveyed nothing humorous at all. He bent over Dougie’s cage and released the latch. “There you are, laddie. Make yourself to home.”
The little gray cat poured himself out through the opening and sat down to wash his face, signaling his utter boredom with his new surroundings. Alasdair can be every bit as cool, Jean thought, although he isn’t as given to posturing.
“The hall cupboard’s large enough for his litter box.” Alasdair gestured toward a narrow door opposite the bathroom. “You’re not thinking of putting him out the night, are you now?”
“No way. Hector and Jackie from across the road might decide to welcome him to the neighborhood. The Elliots live over there, right?”
“Just Roddy Elliot. Cantankerous old chap. Lost his wife, Helen, at the beginning of the month, I’m hearing. His daughter Polly’s married to Noel Brimberry at the Granite Cross.”
“I met Noel earlier this afternoon. His daughter Zoe is helping Michael and Rebecca with the B&B. They told me about Helen Elliot. Small town, Stanelaw. Everyone’s interconnected.”
“Oh aye. Everyone’s interconnected, bugger it all anyway.” The faintest of wry crinkles turned up one corner of Alasdair’s mouth.
There it was, a quick spark like a candle lit behind a frost-covered window. He was trying, wasn’t he? In both meanings of the word.
Jean wrapped her arms around his chest. For a moment he stood unyielding in her embrace, too too solid flesh. Then with a subtle but perceptible shift he softened, just a bit, and returned her embrace. “Ah, don’t mind me,” he said. “We’ll manage well enough.”
She liked hearing that we, even though she had to wonder at his choice of words. He’d been lowering his expectations, too. Fair enough. She rested her head against his shoulder—he was of less than imposing stature himself, and they fit nicely. Standing up, anyway.
Dougie made a figure eight around their legs, then trotted off toward the closest windowsill. Alasdair vented a dust-dry chuckle which ruffled the hair above Jean’s ear, and said, “We’ve things to put away. And a dinner to cook, I reckon.”
Reluctantly, Jean subtracted herself from the embrace. She’d never expected him to indulge in gratuitous fits of billing and cooing, and in that she hadn’t been disappointed. Doing him the courtesy of remaining silent, she went to work sorting things into the refrigerator and various cupboards, discovering a good supply of food and drink already there, including some aging spices and condiments that must have been Wallace’s.
As in any good holiday home, there were plenty of dishes and cooking implements. Not that this is a holiday home, Jean thought as she shoved aside a stack of plastic foodkeepers. The odd vase or print suggested attempts at interior decorating, but the bric-a-brac was neutral, detached, and the place looked a bit bare. Wallace’s personal effects had been cleared away.
Especially from the bedroom, where Jean found Alasdair’s clothing folded in the dresser drawers or hanging to attention in the wardrobe, including his kilt and its appurtenances swaddled in a garment bag. The clothes were arranged on one side, just as his toiletries occupied only one shelf of three in the bathroom, leaving room for her things. She hoped Alasdair wasn’t as meticulous in his personal habits as he was in his intellectual ones. It would be like living with a drill sergeant and his white gloves.
But then, he’d seen her fidgeting around her apartment, card-cataloguing her books and washing his coffee cup almost before it left his hands, and was probably worrying that she’d climb into bed beside him and whip out a clipboard with a pre-flight checklist.
If both of them found it necessary to have command over their environments, did that hint at underlying and possibly troublesome control issues . . . Good grief, Jean told herself as she started back to the front room, you’re focusing so tightly on all of this you’re magnifying gnats into dinosaurs. You sure weren’t indulging in this sort of analysis before your wedding.
And herself murmured in reply, this time you know what you’re getting into.
In the hallway, Alasdair was emptying a bag of cat litter into Dougie’s box. Just as he’d estimated, it fit into one end of a misshapen closet, two feet deep and probably six feet long, that must have originally been a chamber or even a chimney in the original castle wall but now contained a water heater and cleaning supplies.
Dougie himself was stretched out on the windowsill like a miniature sphinx. Jean draped the blanket from his basket across the hollowed seat of an old easy chair, one that wasn’t going to bring any second looks on Antiques Roadshow. “So,” she said, and her voice seemed like a shout in the silence. She reminded herself that it only seemed silent because she was used to living in the city.
Alasdair left the door of the cupboard ajar. “So?”
“How long did Wallace Rutherford live here? Was all this stuff his? There aren’t any personal effects lying around—no reading glasses, no toothbrushes, no monogrammed mugs.”
“He moved house here when the castle was opened, so aye, I’m supposing the furnishings were his.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“I spoke to him on the phone the day before he died is all. He said he was just after having a look at the roof. He knew the place inside and out, I reckon. ”
“Did climbing up to the roof—what is it, five flights up?—bring on his heart attack?”
“There’s four flights from the ground floor to the cap house and a ladder down to the dungeon.”
“Where Wallace was found.”
“Oh aye. Where he was found.” There was that quick frown again, not a full-fledged scowl of suspicion, just a pucker of skepticism along the top of Alasdair’s brows. Policemen were skeptical. It came with the territory. And Alasdair had probably been a skeptic before he’d ever been a cop. Still . . .
A sudden series of sharp raps made them both jump, then each look around to see if the other had noticed. No, the sound wasn’t a message from the next life, but from a former one.
In one stride, Alasdair reached the door and threw it open. Ciara stood on the front porch, her curls and flounces outlined against the darkening courtyard. “Cheers, Alasdair. We’re away. I’ll be talking with you, Jean. Have a good night. Ferniebank’s bogle is a harmless one, I’m promising you that.” With a good-natured megawatt smile, she turned to go.
Instead of slamming the door, Alasdair watched Ciara stroll across the courtyard. Jean craned past his shoulder, trying not to heave an aggravated sigh in his ear.
Keith Bell stood beside the van. He said, as though continuing a conversation, “The surveyors need to outline the foundations of the medieval hospice so we won’t damage them. We can leave transparent panels in the floor over the old footings.” He climbed into the passenger side and slammed the door.
�
��No need for surveyors,” replied Ciara as she wafted into the driver’s seat. “I’ve got a friend who dowses a treat. He’ll trace the foundations and the line leading to Rosslyn as well. A shame Wallace will not be here to see the final designs, but then, it’s all built on his foundation, isn’t it?”
The engine started. The red of the taillights gleamed. The van backed and filled and rolled sedately through the gate and out onto the road, leaving Jean’s and Alasdair’s cars alone. A lamp attached to the front of the shop buzzed and came on, shedding an eerie blue-tinted light across the courtyard.
“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggit beasties and things that go bump in the night, Mystic Scotland turns a profit, eh?” Alasdair’s tone was flat, emotionless. He wasn’t being sarcastic. He was simply stating a fact. “The woman would not recognize a bogle, a ghost, a spirit, or a specter if it pinched her on the bum.”
“Really?” Jean shoved aside the vision of Alasdair pinching Ciara’s ripe, round behind. “She has no ESP? She got all that about the ghost walking down to the chapel and feeling a chill and everything from the Ferniebank leaflet?”
“You and I, lass, have got more of a ghost allergy in our fingernail parings than she’s got in her entire body.”
“Well, telling stories is a respectable profession. Probably about the third-oldest one.”
“The problem is, she’s not recognizing that they’re stories. Not a bit of it.”
“Ah. I see.” Not that Jean was seeing the entire vista, far from it, but at least she was peeking through the keyhole at why the Alasdair and Ciara project had ever gotten started, let alone why it had gone so sour.
The Burning Glass Page 5
