“Roddy,” said Minty, “is too superstitious for his own good. Not unlike Ciara, if in a very different fashion. Helen was a saint, moderating his fits of rancor, but now she’s gone.”
Alasdair extended the plastic container. “Here’s the bit of Isabel’s grave inscription. The one we found Friday evening.”
“Thank you.” Minty set the container down beside her black leather handbag on the windowsill, crossed her arms over her black jacket buttons, and frowned. Maybe they should have packed the stone in something more appropriate, like a Harrod’s hatbox. Not that this was a good time, Minty’s summons notwithstanding. Discreetly, Jean headed right and Alasdair headed left.
The museum building might be medieval stone, walls thick and ceilings low, but its exhibits had been designed to twenty-first-century standards. Displays were sleek and minimalist, glass pane abutted to glass pane, artifacts raised on Lucite pedestals instead of nested on velvet, like tiny spaceships launching themselves into the past. They hadn’t come any cheaper than the cooking school. But then, Angus and Minty probably had a grant for the museum like the one for Ferniebank.
With the feeling she was searching for something but didn’t know what it was—she’d had nightmares like this—Jean eyed Roman votive figurines from St. Mary’s well, pottery, metal implements, objets d’art, a wood and brass medieval money chest, coins from the medieval Roxburgh mint, and coins of Mary, Queen of Scots. A letter from Mary was mounted beneath a lamp attached to a motion sensor so that it was only illuminated when someone bent to read it. A shame one corner of the yellowed paper had been torn away. . . . Hey, Jean thought. A scrap of sixteenth-century paper had been found in the harp.
She read the label: “Letter from Mary, Queen of Scots, to William Sinclair of Ferniebank, thanking him for his hospitality after recovering from her illness in late 1566.” Fine. As far as Jean was concerned, the message could be Mary’s laundry list. Not only was the spidery sixteenth-century writing almost illegible, what she could read showed that the letter was in an almost impenetrable Scots, not English. Still, she had to assume the label was correct, and that this was not the sort of letter that needed to be smuggled anywhere. Rats.
To one side rose a tall glass case like Moses’s column of fire, brightly illuminated, the focus of the room no less because it was empty. Jean knew what had been there before she got close enough to read the plaque: “The Ferniebank Clarsach.”
Alasdair was already inspecting the blue crescents of chipped safety glass above a splintered rim of wood. “This was pried open. Why did the thief not smash, grab, and run?”
“Why did the thief dismantle the clarsach and then return the pieces?” asked Jean.
“Perhaps the thief was looking for another secret compartment. Perhaps his conscience got the best of him.”
“Or her conscience.” Minty strolled across the room, her arms enlacing her chest, her heels clicking and the floor groaning.
“Logan had this glass tested for fingerprints, did he?”
“Forensics found only those of tourists who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. The thief wore gloves.”
Jean envisioned a black-masked burglar wearing prissy, white, artifact-handling gloves. “How did the thief get in?”
“We use a small room in the back as a kitchen. Its window overlooks an alley. The Saturday was warm. The receptionist most unfortunately neglected to lock the window when she closed up, and the thief was able to open it. The alarm went when he opened this display case. P.C. Logan responded straightaway, but it was too late.”
Alasdair’s brows tightened, perhaps imagining the receptionist’s head mounted on a spike outside Glebe House. “The thief happened by just when the window was left open?”
“He could well have been watching for an opportunity,” said Minty.
“A right meticulous thief he was, then. But we already know that.”
Minty loosened her crossed arms enough to raise a hand toward a large color photo of the harp. Its wood was dark with time and perhaps smoke, but gleaming still. The curvature of its body was repeated by its curvilinear ornamentation, artistically shadowed by the photographer’s lights. Hollows that once held jewelry seemed like sad, dark eyes. The carving on the front brace was almost three-dimensional, a scaled snake or dragon curling upwards and no doubt humming along with the music.
“It’s beautiful,” Jean said.
“Have you heard from the museum?” asked Alasdair.
“Repairs are under way. The conservators tell me they’ve uncovered a secret compartment in the front brace, beneath the salmon.”
So the sculpture was of the mythical salmon of inspiration. Minty could no doubt do something inspirational with salmon, probably involving butter, pepper, and herbs. “Was Isabel smuggling messages in aid of Mary, Queen of Scots?” Jean asked.
“So it seems. She intrigued for Mary during the rebellion of the northern earls in 1569, the attempt to put Mary back on the throne after her flight to England.”
“Ciara said something about Gerald concealing bothersome historical truths. Or at least spinning them into something more acceptable during his life, if not now. Is that one of them? Isabel as secret agent?”
“Yes.” Minty stepped toward a TV screen set into the wall beside the photo. Her forefinger with its short but manicured nail pressed a button.
The screen lit with an image of Hugh actually dressed in a suit and tie, holding the harp as tenderly as a small child. Or, considering the slow stroke of his fingertips down its curve, as tenderly as a lover. A musical instrument unplayed is like a woman unloved. He raised his cherubic face and began speaking to the camera. . . .
From the entrance hall came the sound of the front door opening. Michael’s voice called, “Hullo? May we come in?”
Minty spun about, keeping her balance despite the diameter of her heels. “The museum is closed just now.”
Rebecca looked through the doorway. “It’s my husband and I.”
“Ah,” said Minty. “Well then. You’ve been wanting a look round, haven’t you, Dr. Campbell-Reid? And you as well, Dr. Campbell-Reid,” she told Michael as he rolled the pram to a stop at the foot of the staircase and set its brakes.
Hugh’s electronic voice was lilting about how the Lowland harp had faded from popularity when Mary’s son James VI of Scotland went to London to become James I of Britain and the court became anglicized. Something similar happened to the Highland harp 150 years later, in the aftermath of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s disastrous rebellion. “We have one surviving piece with a specifically Lowland title, ‘The Keiking Glass.’ Perhaps Isabel Sinclair played it.”
His fingers plucked the harp strings and a melody filled the air, each note dropping like that rain from heaven that was the quality of mercy, not to mention beauty. Jean looked around at Alasdair, and met his gaze coming back the other way. Yes, Isabel had played that song. She’d played it for them Friday night.
Alasdair suddenly found the floor of great interest, but Jean could still make out the reminiscent quirk on his lips. Her own shiver had a lot more to do with the flesh than the spectral.
Michael and Rebecca drifted into the room. Minty stood with her arms knotted, her face a rock scree dusted with snow, coming forth with no more of Isabel’s story.
Patiently, Jean and Alasdair turned toward another display case, this one holding a miniature of Isabel, off-center, as though a second object had once sat beside it.
Isabel was depicted from the waist up, her layers of clothing and ornament, her starched collar and winged cap, making her exposed hands and face seem as vulnerable as the soft creature inside a shell. Her features were probably idealized, and yet, still, they were features Jean and Alasdair had seen before. One long, tapering hand held a jeweled cross and the other curved toward it—this, she seemed to be saying, this particular myth is my center.
The music faded into a faint resonance and died. Jean looked up to a picture hanging above the portrait,
a pen and ink drawing almost overwhelmed by an ornate Victorian or Edwardian frame. . . . Her heart oozed down into her toes. While the style of the drawing, the swoop of the line and the use of shadow, evoked Gibson Girls and Saturday Evening Post covers, the subject was Isabel running toward the castle. Every detail repeated the ghostly image she and Alasdair had glimpsed the night before, from slippers to feathered cap to the expression that was both fearful and determined.
Beside her, Jean heard Alasdair catch his breath. He bent forward—yes, the sketch was signed “G. Rford 1910.” If the miniature was from the life, then this was from the death. Gerald, too, had been allergic to ghosts. “Was this hanging in the bedroom of the flat at Ferniebank?”
“Yes, it was,” said Minty. “Gerald and Wallace, they were both gentleman artists, unskilled but adequate.”
“Wallace’s leaflet says that Isabel’s ghost walks from the castle down to the chapel, wearing a shroud.”
“That there’s a ghost at all is one of the fairy tales first Gerald and then Wallace created and advertised, and that now have taken on a life of their own.” Minty’s slight frown would in anyone else have been a scowl.
Rebecca and Michael ranged up on Jean’s other side and gazed at the photo, their knowing glances catching the implication of her question.
“Why do you suppose Gerald showed her running?” Jean asked.
“Because she ran to escape her murderers,” said Minty.
In the sudden, profound silence, Jean could hear every breath, the hum of the video machine, the voices from the beer garden across the street, Linda’s gurgles in the front hall.
Then, with a chill teasing the back of her neck, Jean remembered the hacked bones pictured in the Ancient Monuments book. Those were Isabel’s. No wonder that upstairs room was haunted. She and Alasdair should have heard screams, seen the desperate struggle, but no, all they had sensed was the aftermath. Quiet as the grave. Still as death. “Her enemies caught her,” she said.
Minty’s lips curled, but she wasn’t smiling. “Wallace based his guide leaflet on the story handed down in the family, fearfully common one that it is. After he retired and moved house to the castle, however, he organized Gerald’s papers and a few of his original sources such as Queen Mary’s letter. Ciara was correct in one regard: Gerald did bowdlerize the true story.”
Then Roddy was correct, too, Jean thought.
“The truth, however, is much less sensationalistic than Ciara will admit to, with her . . ..” A tremor of emotion crossed Minty’s face, but was gone before Jean could identify it. “Mary’s enemies rode up to the castle as Isabel was returning from the chapel, where she had a confederate—not a lover, a confederate. She barricaded herself in her room.”
“And began burning the correspondence entrusted to her,” said Alasdair, who had also seen the rosy gleam of flames in the windows of Isabel’s room. “That’s when her skirts caught fire.”
“Very clever, Mr. Cameron. Her skirts caught fire indeed. At that instant her assailants burst through the door and stabbed her to death, then fought their way out of the castle.”
Everyone seemed to be restraining their living breaths. At last Rebecca said, “I reckon her own family put the expurgated version about. It wasn’t healthy to be seen taking the wrong side.”
“Loyalties are often more complex than the ordinary person realizes,” Minty returned.
Like truth, Jean thought. Especially when the truth is being spun like a wheel of fortune, round and round and where it stops nobody knows.
“Roddy Elliot was telling us,” said Alasdair, “that the spacing of Isabel’s inscription, separating out the letters that spell catin, proves that she was a whore.”
“That tale arose to explain the mistake on the inscription,” said Minty, with only the briefest wince, “not the other way round. Add in Gerald’s romantic story of the monk, and there you are.”
Not that there was anything wrong with romance. Jean said, “Maybe Isabel’s connection to Mary suggested that interpretation, since some people questioned her morals, too.”
Minty stared, what color remaining in her face draining away. Then she blinked rapidly. “Ah, yes, Mary, Queen of Scots, was quite the object of scandal.”
Jean raked back through what she’d said, but couldn’t explain that reaction.
Alasdair’s tilt of the head hinted that Minty might be committing censorship herself. “Where are Gerald’s papers now? Including that epic poem.”
“Most of the originals are here at the museum, available to scholars, although I expect a few items are amongst Wallace’s personal possessions yet, such as those drawings you gave P.C. Logan.”
“I didn’t . . .” Alasdair cleared his throat. “Ciara’s been reading the originals, then?”
“I said available to scholars. She’s based her work on copies made by Wallace.” Minty’s dark eyes glittered like obsidian in her—no, not entirely pallid face. Her cheekbones had gone crimson. A hot flash? Jean wondered. Anger? Minty’s layers of ice went deeper than Alasdair’s, but the woman wasn’t a completely dead planet. Minty and Ciara might be sharing a bed, economically speaking, but neither was comfortable with the sleeping arrangements.
“You collected Wallace’s things from the flat, did you?” Alasdair persisted. “Have you got an inventory?”
“No. Polly cleared most everything into the boxes. I pulled out a memento or two, the odd photograph and the like. There’s nothing valuable left, save to a tradesman recycling old paper.” Minty strode back to the window and picked up her handbag. “I asked you to stop by, Mr. Cameron, so I could give you this. Legally, it’s part of the Ferniebank estate.”
Everyone clustered around as she produced a small box and handed it to Alasdair. He opened it. “The burning-glass.”
Inside the box, nestled on a square of cotton batting, lay a palm-sized disc. What glass wasn’t covered by a flaky black crust was the color of milky tea, glowing sullenly in the light. The crust itself had peeled into what, if you looked at it slantwise and squinted, could be the map of Mexico. As relics went, this one was pretty sad . . . Wait a minute, Jean thought.
“May I?” Michael took the box from Alasdair’s hand and held it up. “This is no lens. It’s not plano-convex, it’s flat. The encrustation is never soot. It’s the oxidized silver backing of a mirror.”
“A looking glass,” said Jean. “A keiking glass.”
Michael passed the box to Rebecca. “This has been buried,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“It turned up in the dig,” Minty answered, “in a rubbish heap dating to Gerald’s occupation of the building. It’s his, I expect, no more than a shaving mirror.”
“What else happened at the dig?” asked Jean.
“The usual. There was great exclamation over bits of pottery and grains of pollen. The archaeologists even excavated beneath the floor of the chapel.”
“Where they opened Isabel’s grave.”
“A bit of grave-robbing never goes amiss, if it’s in the name of science.”
Alasdair reclaimed the box and replaced its lid. “This, ah, glass was in the case with Isabel’s miniature, was it?”
“I’m afraid so. Angus insisted we place it here, with the genuine miniature and the genuine harp, because it illustrated Wallace’s story, and the tourists make a meal of it all.”
“And you removed it from the museum after the burglary,” Alasdair persisted.
“I did do, yes. Stanelaw Museum has become a laughingstock after the theft of the harp. How much greater a one would it be if it were known that this, this artifact, the crux of the Ferniebank legend, is a lie. As so much to do with Ferniebank is a lie. Please give it to Ciara, Mr. Cameron, in your capacity as P and S administrator.” Minty waved imperiously.
She could have given it to Ciara herself, Jean thought, but then, when she saw Ciara last night, Angus was still alive, and would have—what would Angus have done, anyway? If this was the truth about the dig t
hat Hugh had almost overheard, surely it would have been Angus shushing Minty, not the other way around.
Minty turned back to the windowsill, pulled a set of keys from her handbag, and peeled back the lid of the plastic container. Picking up the piece of stone with its inscription, she led the way across the room—if she’d been wearing a train, she’d have expected Jean and Rebecca to carry it—and stopped beside a flat display case, which she unlocked and opened.
The bottom of the case was covered by a professionally drawn illustration of the entire inscription, the extant pieces laid forlornly in the appropriate places and drained of their reddish hue by the glare of the spotlight. Minty worked the icj up close to the ac that Wallace had been carrying in his pocket when he died, adjusted each of the other pieces a thirty-second of an inch or so, and then stepped back to contemplate her handiwork.
The display reminded Jean of the drawing that Logan had confiscated—not that she had the sketch there for comparison. Still, the five missing pieces from the top and left side of the inscription were all accounted for, while the harp was missing and presumably long gone. Not that that would stop Ciara from having a replica made, if she wanted—the upper edge of the ic jac pieces showed the line of the lower edge of the harp piece.
“Interesting,” said Michael, “how the er of Sinncler is turned up at a right angle. And why’s there a wee ‘m’ beside it?”
Alasdair said, “I inspected the inscription on the Friday, and was thinking that was a crack in the stone is all.”
“Following on Gerald’s fearfully imaginative opinion, Angus and Wallace felt that it was an ‘m’ and therefore had the artist draw it that way.” Minty closed and locked the display case. “Wallace quite properly collected each of these pieces as they weathered off the inscription. And I expect Roddy Elliot had a hand in as well, Mr. Cameron. That’s why Zoe had this bit.”
Oh yes, Jean thought, Minty did see all, know all. Although Alasdair was way out ahead of her.
He asked, “What of Derek Trotter, then?”
“An example of the dreadful child-rearing practices endemic in our modern society.” Minty retreated toward the window. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s paperwork to be done. Birth, death, property—there’s always paperwork.”
The Burning Glass Page 25
