The Burning Glass

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Alasdair checked his watch and plucked an industrial-strength flashlight from its bracket next to the door. “It’s time to be closing the place down. Fancy a private tour of the keep?” His lips were clamped in a straight line, not just his upper one but his lower one stiff as well, and his jaw was set. And yet his eye sparked again, if not with humor then at least with resignation.

  Well it only took a few sparks to set tinder alight, if the tinder was susceptible to flame. “So there really is a ghost.”

  “Decide for yourself,” Alasdair answered, and escorted her into the dusk.

  Chapter Six

  Modern wooden steps led up to the entrance of Ferniebank Castle. Jean levered herself over the stone threshold into a small room so dark she could make out only the rectangular shapes of three more doorways, two opaque with shadow, one dimly lighted. Chill oozed from the gritty floor through her shoes and up her legs. A musty odor, like that of a wet dog, hung so thick in the air it felt like a pillow pressed to her face.

  No, Ferniebank was not making a good first impression. To heck with her feminist principles—she inched closer to Alasdair’s steady, sturdy body.

  He was either oblivious to her discomfort or too polite to comment. “This entrance might not have been the original. Hard to say. These places are like mazes in three dimensions.”

  “Your average Virginia plantation looks simple by comparison,” Jean managed to reply.

  He leaned past her. A switch snapped and a light came on, a bare bulb dangling from the vaulted ceiling like a spider’s prey from its web. “The electricity supply’s a bit dodgy in these airts,” Alasdair said, brandishing the flashlight the way he might once have brandished a truncheon. “The electric flex dates back to the last spasm of restoration round and about 1900, before the place was abandoned. I’d not go in here after dark without this torch.”

  She could say something about not going into the place after dark at all, but she was inflicting enough of her phobias on the man as it was.

  “Say the word ‘castle,’ ” Alasdair went on, “and most trippers from your part of world think of something like Floors, outwith Kelso.”

  “Well, yeah. Too many Hollywood set designers.” Floors was a vast Georgian country house, remodeled and romanticized by the dictates of Victorian fashion into a fairytale castle, its roof bristling with turrets, pinnacles, and cupolas. Jean visualized carriages manned by white-wigged footmen decanting bejeweled guests into Floors’s marble halls. Here, at Ferniebank, she imagined reivers in steel bonnets riding down out of the mist like avenging—not angels. Demons.

  Setting one of his large, comforting hands in the small of her back, Alasdair guided her through the lighter doorway into a square vaulted room. Each of its three windows contained a gleaming slice of the twilight. This room, now, had a sort of derelict charm.

  If her sense of direction wasn’t too badly skewed, the wall that was covered on this side with paneling so old it looked moth-eaten was the one that on the other side was neatly whitewashed stone, the line of demarcation between castle and flat. The paneling was interrupted by a probably eighteenth-century Georgian door, its frame lopsided. In the narrow slices of space between door and frame Jean saw nothing but charcoal-gray stone. On the apartment side, then, the doorway had been filled in and painted over. There was something—not necessarily eerie, but definitely evocative, perhaps even symbolic—about a blocked doorway.

  But then, in this part of the world home renovation didn’t mean a garage conversion. It meant generation after generation remodeling for convenience, safety, and fashion. She started breathing through her nose again and discovered that she was getting used to the smell. “This is the Laigh Hall, right? The lower hall, where the flunkeys and the petitioners awaited the lord’s pleasure. I bet the flat used to be the kitchens, although that fireplace in the living room is too small to have been the main one.”

  “Right you are. The High Hall’s just this way.” Alasdair waved her on toward a spiral staircase leading upwards. She placed each foot with care on the misshapen treads. If she slipped he would break her fall, but breaking him wasn’t what she had in mind.

  “Ferniebank’s a right ordinary border keep,” Alasdair said to her back, “built of whinstone rubble with sandstone dressings and an unusually tenacious lime mortar. The place might once have been related to the royal stronghold at Roxburgh.”

  “Which went into a decline after James III’s favorite cannon blew up and took him with it,” said Jean. “Sort of the story of Scotland in microcosm, hoist with its own petard.”

  Behind her Alasdair made a sound between a snort and a chuckle. “We’ve got a second-, perhaps third-rank castle here. The action was always somewhere else, ’til now, at the least.”

  They emerged into a large, tall room, this one with a wooden floor that made each footstep resound like a drumbeat. In the sudden light of another bare bulb, Jean saw stained plaster ceilings, windows gleaming from deep embrasures, paneling revealing the ghosts of old paintings, and the empty maw of a fireplace big enough to set up an office for Keith Bell, complete with drafting table and water cooler. The place was growing on her, she decided, and not like mold.

  A rustling noise, almost like whispering, seemed to emanate from the stone itself. But her sixth sense, the ghost detector, didn’t react. “Bats? Birds? Rats?”

  “All of the above.” Alasdair shot a glance upwards, but even he didn’t have x-ray vision. His spook sensor must not be sounding an alarm, either. “The well might date to Roman times or before, the original chapel to the ninth century, perhaps. The castle’s right modern, dates to the fourteenth century, built by Robert the Bruce’s henchman, William Saint Clair of Rosslyn and Orkney. The William Saint Clair who built Rosslyn Chapel in the fifteenth century built a new chapel here as well, obliged to maintain his status with the neighbors.”

  “And the hospice? Does that go back to Robert the Bruce looking for a cure for his leprosy or syphilis or whatever it was he had?”

  “So it seems. Though the most famous patient was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, in 1566. I cannot tell you a thing, can I?” he added, not in the acid tone he might once have used, but like a teacher indulging a bright pupil.

  She’d loosened up enough that she was able to curtsey, spreading imaginary crinolines around her bent knees. A good thing she wasn’t actually wearing a skirt, though. There were sneaky little drafts in this place, teasing her ankles like invisible cats. “You’ve done your homework, too.”

  “Of course.” He acknowledged her curtsey with a regal inclination of his head. “Soon after Mary’s son James succeeded Elizabeth, becoming king of England as well as king of Scots, Ferniebank fell into the hands of the Kerrs, who were widely considered to be ruffians.”

  “And who now own Floors. Miranda’s Duncan owes a lot more to that branch of the family, the, er, smoothians.”

  That time Alasdair actually laughed. “At some point the place was handed off, voluntarily or otherwise, to the Douglases. One of them updated it in the 1680s or so. Good job he wasn’t wealthy, or he’d have torn it down and built himself a mansion.”

  “Plus he probably wanted to hang on to some of the defensive elements. Peace hadn’t exactly broken out yet in Scotland.”

  “Who’s to say if it ever will do?” Alasdair’s outstretched flashlight guided Jean into another stairwell. “The last Douglas was a wastrel who mortgaged the place to the Rutherfords. They foreclosed in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, but only Gerald, Wallace’s grandfather, ever lived here. He was an artist and poet—a ruin suited his fancies, I reckon.”

  “They’d have fueled mine, too, but in a different way,” Jean said.

  “After Gerald died in the flu epidemic just after World War One, the place fell further into disrepair, until Angus Rutherford, white knight, rode to the rescue. And there you have the potted history of Ferniebank. Mind your head, that lintel’s a bit low.”

  It was really low if Jean had to duck. She
maneuvered out of the stairwell and followed Alasdair’s guiding light through the two upper stories. He paused only once to get his bearings—his inner compass was directional as well as moral, it seemed—and spoke again when they’d achieved the cap house, a tiny, gabled room perched atop the castle like the pilot house atop a steamboat. Indicating the door leading out to the roofs, he said, “Fancy a dander round the parapet?”

  “I’ll pass, thanks. When they were handing out the phobias—phobii?—I missed out on the fear of heights. Still, the roof of a crumbling old building isn’t a good place for a moonlight stroll.”

  “Or a sunlight one.” Alasdair led the way back down the narrow, twisting steps to the top floor, where he directed her to one of the rooms beneath the eaves. The nineteenth-century door in its sagging frame was held open by a piece of twine running between the rusted knob and a hook embedded in the wall.

  This time when he clicked the switch there was no burst of harsh, yellow light. “Well, then,” he muttered, and switched on the flashlight to guide them to a dormer window filled with twelve panes of dusty antique glass. Then he cast the light around the empty room. Behind the splintered paneling the stones were black, almost as sooty as the stone in the empty fireplace.

  Jean felt as though a drapery settled over her, cold, heavy, and sad. Trying to evade her unease, she turned to look out at the dark countryside. Its constellations of lights were distorted by the old glass, so that they seemed distant in time as well as in space. If she made her way to one of those lights, would she find herself in, say, an elegant eighteenth-century drawing room whose inhabitants were speculating on Charles Edward Stuart’s claim to the throne . . . A car passed on the road below, headlights feeling their way, the engine noise blending with the rush of wind in the trees.

  With a shiver, Jean looked back into the room. Forlorn antiquity got her every time, and with its peeling paint, chipped mantelpieces, collapsing plaster, cracked paneling, and cobwebbed cupboards, Ferniebank was certainly forlorn. To say nothing of fascinating, layered with the debris of lives beyond counting.

  As Michael had said, if it weren’t for people like Ciara, these old buildings would fall to ruins. If she and Keith could be trusted not to throw the historical baby out with the trendy bath water, her conference and healing center would mean new life in the old vessel. Jean gritted her teeth and sent a feeler of appreciation toward the Mystic Scotland van, which would be past Kelso by now. But then, why should it even be past Stanelaw? Ciara and her minion were probably staying in the village, now that Ferniebank was at last the scene of the action.

  “What are you thinking?” Alasdair stood so close beside her she could feel the prickle of his energy field. His grave profile was pale against the gloom outside the beam of light. He wasn’t asking what she thought, but what she felt.

  She focused, pulling her thoughts around her like a cloak. Warily, so nothing would leap out at her, she eased a psychic toe into her sixth sense. Heavy. Sad. Cold. Uneasy. The chill teased the back of her neck, crushing her shoulders with the inert weight of earth or clay. “The prime of our land are cauld in the clay,” went the old lament, “The Flowers of the Forest.”

  “This is the room that’s haunted,” she whispered, stating, not asking.

  “Oh aye.”

  “Quiet as the grave, still as death . . . I can’t see or hear a thing.”

  “Nor can I. But I can feel it, a dirty great stone in the pit of my stomach. An icicle in my gut.”

  The gelid pressure seemed to lift, and the fine hair on the nape of her neck settled back into place. Jean swung around to face Alasdair. In the backspatter of light from the flashlight, his regular, even ordinary, features looked as though they’d been hacked out of whinstone and assembled with an unusually tenacious intellect. “Is that how it feels to you?” she asked.

  “It’s different for you, is it?”

  “It’s like a wet blanket, a literal one. And a sensation on the back of my neck like invisible cobwebs.” She glanced over her shoulder, but nothing was there that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Ghosts weren’t dangerous. They were only recordings of emotions long past. It was the emotions themselves that hurt.

  “Reality can be slippy at best,” murmured Alasdair. “But losing it entirely can be a bit . . .”

  “Disconcerting,” Jean finished, opting for a milder word than horrifying. “I was wondering back in June if the two of us together made a sort of critical mass when it comes to ghost-spotting.”

  “Aye, I was thinking that as well. No joy this night, though—the ghost’s not walking.”

  “Or no sorrow, depending. Somebody has to have seen this ghost to know it’s a her. Did Wallace sense her, do you think? Or did he pick up the story from the leaflet, too?”

  “It was Wallace who wrote the leaflet, as well as illustrating it. Like as not he heard the tale locally. It’s the sort of tale you’re always hearing locally, fancies made up after the fact.”

  “If he did hear it locally, he didn’t fancy it up any. The account in the leaflet’s pretty bald—Isabel Sinclair died trying to elope. Do you know the details?”

  “A longer version’s in the P and S files, written in full nineteenth-century verbiage by Gerald Rutherford.” Alasdair lowered the flashlight, creating a bright puddle at their feet like a spotlight on a stage, the actors waiting in the wings for their cues. “Isabel was the daughter of the Sinclair who was laird of Ferniebank during the time of Mary Stuart. A time of grand confusion and conflict, with religious issues fanning the flames and Mary in it to the starched ruff at her neck, but then, Scotland’s always having times of grand confusion and conflict.”

  “Let me guess. Isabel loved one man, but her father wanted her to make a marriage of convenience. A guy twice her age but filthy rich.” Jean gazed again around the room. No, whatever was here earlier was gone. The room still seemed sad, but it was the prosaic sorrow of dereliction.

  “Got it in one. What makes this tale a bit different is that Isabel’s lover—figurative or literal, who knows—was one of the monks serving at the hospice.”

  “So the relationship was doubly doomed.”

  “That it was. The laird, her father, locked her away here, in her room, ’til the wedding day. And she pined, playing sad songs on her clarsach.”

  “The Ferniebank Clarsach, the one dating back to Robert the Bruce?”

  “Oh aye. The one Isabel herself played for Mary during her visit to the hospice, landing herself a position as lady-in-waiting. The one stolen from the village museum. Next time,” added Alasdair, “they’d jolly well better be asking P and S for assistance.”

  “No kidding. Have you heard anything more about that? Is there a suspect? A trail? Clues?”

  “No clues. Or none for me, at the least. It’s not my business.” His tone had an edge that made Jean glance around sharply, but he was already going on with the story. “The monk—he must have had a name, but that’s dropped out of the telling—he and Isabel worked out a plan.”

  “They probably found a sympathetic servant to exchange messages. Or he’d signal to her from the chapel—not as many trees then, I bet.”

  “I’m not seeing them waving semaphores,” said Alasdair. “However they managed, they agreed that on the day of the wedding, midsummer’s morn, she’d set the keep afire. Everyone would go running outside, bringing her along, and she’d make her escape with the monk.”

  “Except, like so many best-laid plans, this one went agley.”

  “Isabel used a burning-glass, a lens, to focus the sunlight onto a bit of kindling . . .”

  “Well, this window faces east of north, sort of.” Jean felt again the weight of time and grief oozing from her neck down her back, and she stepped closer to Alasdair’s warmth, bracing herself for the denouement of the story.

  He put his free arm around her. “Although using the embers of her own fire seems much more likely, considering the chance of cloud. In any event, the flames got away, b
locked her escape, and she died. Suffocated by the smoke before she could burn, I’m thinking, if that’s any comfort to you. And the monk died soon after of some foul disease he caught tending to the sick.”

  “There’s not much comfort in that story, Alasdair, typical or not. True or not.” Shuddering, Jean imagined the suffocating pall of smoke, the door locked, the only window high above the unforgiving ground. The shrieks, if not of Isabel herself, then her family. The monk seeing the dark smoke spread like a storm cloud before Death’s pale horse . . . The stones behind the paneling were sooty not with age but with fire. She coughed, her lungs turning themselves inside out, ridding themselves of something that was no more than blistering memory.

  Alasdair embraced her shoulders, holding her close, head bowed as though he was feeling that weight in his own gut. Then with a sharp intake of breath, he looked up.

  Jean listened. She heard again that faint whispering or rustling, this time with what sounded like distant, light steps. “That noise, that’s not a ghost.”

  “Not a bit of it. Someone’s in the building. Come along, quick smart!”

  Chapter Seven

  Alasdair seized Jean’s hand and pulled her out of the room. Deliberate as a hunting cat, he paced down a flight of stairs and along a corridor, then down another flight, sweeping every room, every corner, with his light.

  She’d meant that the noise was caused by a draft or a branch tapping a window. But Alasdair had leaped nimbly to the conclusion that the source was human, someone who was hiding from them. He had a point. Stray pedestrian visitors would have made themselves known by now, wouldn’t they?

  She held onto his hand and concentrated on keeping her feet, glad he knew where he was going. All the ravaged cavities of rooms looked alike . . . Alasdair stopped dead in the middle of the High Hall, beneath the glare of the light bulb, and Jean caromed off his side.