Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  “Superbe homme,” murmured Eircheard. “Sous pear bum. Under the pear-shaped arse.”

  “Focus,” I said shortly. “Both Terry and Beerbohm yammering on about forests and trees can’t be a coincidence. Especially in light of Sir Angus’s last words. Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.”

  “That isn’t what he said,” grumbled Eircheard.

  “What?”

  “Birnam Wood. That isn’t what he said.”

  Lady Nairn rolled her eyes. “He’d just had a stroke. It was what he meant.”

  Eircheard looked at me. “What he said was ‘Dunsinnan must go to the Birnam tree.’ Not the wood. And if you’re wanting to put a really fine point on it, it wasn’t ‘Birnam’ he said, either. ‘Birble,’ or ‘burble,’ or ‘bourbon,’ or something.”

  “‘Birbam,’” said Lady Nairn curtly. “‘Dunsinnan must go to the Birbam tree.’”

  “Pear bum, bare bum,” Eircheard chanted under his breath, back to puzzling out Ellen Terry’s correspondent. “Beer bum, burr bum.”

  “Will you be quiet?” snapped Lady Nairn.

  “No,” I said suddenly. “Say it again.”

  “‘Beer bum, burr bum’?”

  I felt a flicker of excitement. “Did he say ‘go to the Birbam tree’?”

  “No. Just ‘to Birbam tree.’”

  “You’re a superbe homme yourself,” I said, kissing him on the cheek. “It’s not ‘Birnam,’ and it’s not ‘Birbam.’” I pointed to the drawing. “It’s ‘Beerbohm.’”

  “The cartoonist?” asked Eircheard. “Max Beerbohm?”

  “Beerbohm, yes. Max, no. His older half brother, Herbert.

  Lady Nairn’s eyes lit up. “Herbert Beerbohm Tree.”

  “Tree?” hooted Eircheard. “One of the great Shakespearean actors and theater impresarios of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras,” I said. “His family name was Beerbohm, but when Herbert went on the stage he felt it didn’t sound English enough, so he translated the last syllable, bohm or baum, from the German to get Tree. As it happens, one of his greatest roles was Macbeth.”

  “Monsieur Superbe Homme,” said Eircheard with satisfaction. I smiled. “A cross-language pun of sorts. At a guess, the name ‘Beerbohm’ is pronounced something between ‘pear bum’ and ‘bare bum’ in french. He’s supposed to have been superb, too. Tall and handsome. Witty. Gallant. He started RADA—the royal Academy of Dramatic Arts—and was knighted. Also superbe in the french sense: splendid, magnificent, proud. Though apparently not arrogant…”

  “But dead, I take it,” said Eircheard.

  “Quite.”

  “So how was Sir Angus going to go to him? Do we know where he’s buried?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Where he lived?”

  “No—yes.” I stood up and sat down again. “Yes. Lady Nairn, was Sir Angus a fan of Phantom of the Opera?”

  “Angus hated musicals,” she said. “fairly sniffy about them, actually. He preferred Verdi and Wagner. But after his stroke, I found two tickets to Phantom in his wallet. I assumed he meant to take Lily.”

  I stood still in the center of the room, adrenaline surging through me. “He wasn’t going to Birnam Wood. Or the Birnam tree. He was going to Beerbohm Tree. And Tree lived at the theater. His theater. The theater he built and ran. Her Majesty’s Theatre, in London.”

  “Oh, good Lord,” said Lady Nairn.

  “What?” asked Eircheard. “What?”

  “Where Phantom’s been playing for nearly three decades,” I said. I turned to Lady Nairn. “Do you have anything of Tree’s in your collection?”

  She was skimming out of the room when the sound of sirens floated through the window.

  Coming back to the desk, Lady Nairn slid the papers back into the folder, which she stuffed into a tote and handed to me along with the tight bundle of my blood-soaked clothes. “Time to go, Kate.”

  27

  “MY PLACE,” SAID Eircheard. “We’ll burn those clothes in the forge and get you on your way for London.”

  Lady Nairn led us swiftly to a back stairway. At the bottom, we came to a postern door opening onto a walled garden. The trees of the surrounding pine wood marched right up to the garden wall. Lady Nairn unlocked the small, stout oak door that led through it.

  “I have something of Tree’s you should see,” she said with quiet urgency. “I’ll be ten minutes behind you. If I’m longer than that, don’t wait. Now go.”

  As two police cars rolled up the gravel drive, Eircheard and I slipped south through the trees. After a while, we turned back westward, Eircheard’s rolling gait giving our footsteps a kind of jazz syncopation; other than our footsteps, the woods were quiet. High wispy clouds raced across the sky. Past the road that turned off toward the hill, we cut back to the main road. Edging through the dry bracken, Eircheard found a place dappled with dark shade and beckoned me forward. We quickly crossed the lane and entered the woods on the opposite side. Five minutes later, we walked into the smithy. I prowled about, feeling exposed, until Eircheard said, “Make yourself useful,” and showed me how to work the bellows as he stoked up the fire. The fire blazed up from red to orange and yellow that paled into white. He had just fed my bloody jacket into the flames when Lady Nairn scurried in, her cheeks pink and her breath coming in short gasps. “McGregor,” she gasped. “On a mission. Headed this way and looking for Kate.”

  Eircheard thrust the rest of my clothes into the fire, and Lady Nairn grabbed my hand, pulling me back outside. As we ran across the field toward the woods at the side of his house, I heard the clang of a hammer on metal. Eircheard was forging. We ducked into the trees, and a car turned into the drive behind us.

  Crouching beneath some dying ferns, we watched the police car pull to a stop, its doors flashing in the sun as they opened. DI McGregor and her sergeant got out and went into the forge. Eircheard’s hammer beats never paused.

  “Kate—”

  I shook my head impatiently. “I need to hear what McGregor has to say.”

  “Eircheard will tell us. I need to tell you who’s behind all this.” My eyes locked on hers. As she caught her breath and the pink in her cheeks subsided, she looked ashen. I let her draw me deeper into the trees, into a clearing where pale light and the odd bird-call drifted down through lacy branches whose last clinging leaves were dry as paper. I blinked, realizing where we were: back in the stone circle. In the morning sun, the standing stones looked squat and sleepy. Stones that had seemed to loom taller than I in the darkness rose only to my shoulders; half of them had tipped and fallen. Even so, it was a place of brooding power. Asleep, not drained or dead.

  We crouched in the shadow of one of three big stones fallen together, where I could still see the smithy and the car.

  “I’m sure Lucas is involved. He has to be. But with him, or behind him, is someone far worse.” She swallowed. “It’s my niece, Kate. My sister’s child. Her name is Carrie Douglas. I’d rather face Lucas any day. His hatred may be thick, but it’s standard flesh-and-blood wickedness. Jealousy and greed: things you can understand in a visceral way. But Carrie—” She paused. “Her evil is uncanny. Fey.”

  She ran a hand over her mouth. “After my sister died, when Carrie was twelve, Angus and I took her in—my sister had never identified the father. We gave her a home and did our best to love her, but she was…cruel. Not in the normal small ways of children still learning to be civilized. She enjoyed causing pain, and her eyes always looked as if she were seeing more than she ought to be. Frankly, she frightened me. And she’d frightened her mother, though my sister was too loyal to say so. But she was bright and curious, especially about the craft.”

  “Witchcraft?”

  “It’s in her blood. In our family, it’s a tradition passed down from mother to daughter. It’s in her name, too: Carrie’s short for Cerridwen…a Welsh triple goddess famed for cauldron magic. But her mother was dead, and I would not teach her.” She sniffed. “Walling her out was not, I’ve thought sinc
e, the right response. She went off and found other masters.

  “On her seventeenth birthday, I found her on the hilltop with my daughter. There was a cauldron. In it was a dead adder and the head of Elizabeth’s pet cat.”

  I grimaced.

  “Next to it, Elizabeth was bound and naked. Carrie had…cut her.” She put a hand out to the stone, as if she needed steadying, though we were both sitting down. “She likes to mark things—and people—with the old Pictish symbol of a cauldron. A large circle with two tiny circles on either side, a line running through the center of all three.” With one finger, she traced the design on the rock:

  “It’s a cauldron seen from above, hanging from a bar over a fire, with the two lugs, or handles, on either side.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked out toward the smithy. “She’d carved it right over Elizabeth’s pubic area. Elizabeth was ten.”

  She gave a little shake, pulling herself loose from the memory and turning her attention to me. “Angus wouldn’t prosecute her. More because he did not want to drag our daughter through the consequences than out of any family loyalty. But he banished her from our house and our lives then and there…. This was almost thirty years ago.”

  “And you think she’s back?”

  “I’ve just spoken to Ben, Kate. He saw a symbol carved into Sybilla’s belly.” My stomach tightened with revulsion. “A large circle with two small circles on either side. It seems to have been scratched into Auld Callie’s shoulder as well. McGregor asked me about it. I told her I had no idea what it meant.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It makes sense, of a kind, of Callie’s murder, even before they needed blood for ritual consecration,” Lady Nairn said bleakly. “She could identify Carrie, you see.”

  “Does Lily know any of this?”

  Her face clouded. “No. I’ve never told her about either Lucas or Carrie. I probably should have, especially when she got so taken with Corra ravensbrook. All that stuff about Dunsinnan in Ancient Pictland—”

  “You think it may have come from Carrie?”

  “She’s not a bored housewife.” Her lips twisted in disgust. “The Scottish counterpart of Cerridwen is a crane goddess named Corra. And ‘Douglas’ is Gaelic for ‘dark water.’”

  “ravensbrook,” I murmured. “So Corra ravensbrook is Carrie Douglas.”

  She nodded. “I started to tell Lily, more than once. But somehow it always seemed like taking a hammer to her innocence.”

  And what’s happened to her innocence now? I thought. “What’s Carrie after?” I asked aloud. “I mean—Macbeth works his magic to gain knowledge. But the ability to play the stock market or manipulate Vegas…” I shook my head. “It seems too mundane, anticlimactic even, for someone who’d…”

  “Hang Auld Callie and carve up Sybilla?” Lady Nairn said softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t be distracted, Kate, by Aubrey or Dee or even Macbeth himself. Ellen Terry’s source, my family’s legends, and now Aubrey all say that what Shakespeare altered—what’s missing—isn’t something to do with Macbeth conjuring. It has to do with the witches’ magic…. What is it you do? Macbeth cries as he enters. And the witches answer as one….”

  My voice slid through the words along with hers: “A deed without a name.”

  “That’s the rite that’s missing,” said Lady Nairn. “That’s what Carrie wants.”

  “But it’s not missing. The witches are there, dancing around a cauldron.”

  “Oh, there’s cauldron magic present, but it’s the stuff of nursery rhymes. Or nursery nightmares. And if Macbeth could see and hear what they’re doing, why ask?”

  She had twisted her hands together. “Celtic myth is scattered with cauldron magic, Kate. Cauldrons of plenty and prophecy, mostly. But the goddess Cerridwen’s cauldron is also, quite specifically, about poetry. Shorthand for inspiration of all kinds. For genius. The charismatic ability to conjure up shared dreams so bright and so strong that they move people to action. No amount of hard work or study or card-counting can buy you that. Nothing can buy it. It’s a flash of fire from the gods that you are given, or you are not.” Her eyes met mine. “But if there was some promise of manipulating such a flash of power? Of directing or luring the thunderbolt of the gods to land where you wished? That, I think, someone like Carrie might well kill for.”

  Lily had boasted that her beau would reshape storytelling, as Shakespeare once had. I pushed that thought away. “What promise?” I asked shortly. “This is the twenty-first century. What promise could Carrie convince herself of?”

  Lady Nairn drew in a deep breath. “There are those who say that the play itself is proof. More specifically, the playwright.”

  “Shakespeare?”

  Her famous turquoise eyes, holding mine, seemed fathomless. “Some say he was able to record such a rite because he witnessed it, Kate. And having witnessed it…that he benefited from it.”

  I jumped to my feet, my breath coming in short bursts as if I’d been running. “Are you suggesting that Shakespeare’s genius came from a rite of magic? That’s absurd.”

  Lady Nairn rose beside me. “Is it? He was a poor boy, a glover’s son, from a provincial backwater. He left behind no record of education. No records at all, really, save that he sired three children and then disappeared for seven years, after which he showed up in London, his pen flowing with astonishing brilliance.”

  “It’s extraordinary, I’ll give you that. But to explain the inexplicable by totting it up to a moment of hocus-pocus—”

  She was as calm and cool as I was exasperated. “Did what you saw last night look like hocus-pocus?”

  I was silent, remembering the sweep of moonlight and starlight on the hill, the strange rise of the keening voice. And the horned man with the eyes of an owl. “Who was he?” I asked tightly. “The horned man?”

  “Eircheard.”

  “No.” It was not Eircheard I had seen. It wasn’t possible. I’d seen a younger, fitter man who’d had no limp.

  But Lady Nairn was adamant. “He’s been a member of my coven for a number of years, Kate. After Angus died, he stepped into the role of priest. I had a driver collect him after the festival and drive him back here directly. He was—worse for wear, let’s say, but he was here. Just before you saw him, he’d called down the god…. Why? Who did you see?”

  I stared at her, feeling the world sway beneath me. The very air playing over that hill seemed to make me see things that weren’t there. I didn’t want to think about that. “You meant to work magic with this production as well, didn’t you?”

  A couple of leaves had stuck in her hair. She looked like a dryad.

  She smiled. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” she said lightly. “What you or I can or can’t believe, Kate, doesn’t matter. It’s what Carrie believes that matters just now. However he came by it, it seems that Shakespeare wrote a dark and terrible rite of cauldron magic into Macbeth and later withdrew it. If Carrie believes, as I think she does, that she can use it to manipulate divine inspiration, then if she gets hold of it, she will perform it.”

  Beyond the wood, the hammering stopped. Presently Eircheard emerged with the two detectives, walking around to the back of the smithy. While McGregor stood talking to Eircheard, the sergeant peeked into the bedroom and opened the back of the van, apparently with Eircheard’s permission.

  Silently, I drew forward to the edge of the wood. Their voices floated thinly across the field. “What makes you think Kate was up there?” asked Eircheard.

  McGregor’s smile was cold. “fingerprints tentatively matching those in her room are all over a car at the base of the hill. And there’s blood in the trunk. A lot of it.”

  Bile rose in my throat. Had Sybilla been in the car as I drove? Already dead—or even worse, still alive? Had I driven her to her death?

  “Give her up,” McGregor said silkily, “and I’ll go lightly on you.”

  “Kin
d of you,” said Eircheard, his hands in his pockets. “But I don’t have her to give.”

  McGregor sniffed, surveying the smithy and the heap of scrap metal behind it. “Be careful, Mr. Kinross. A knife like some that you’ve made seems to have been involved in two homicides.” She turned back to him. “I know your history. If you had anything to do with either of them, I’ll see to it that you never see the light of day again.”

  There was a stiff moment of silence. “Good day,” said McGregor. And then she turned on her heel, her mouth still curved in a serpent’s smile, and left, her sergeant trotting alongside.

  Eircheard watched her go and then went back around and into the smithy. As the police car pulled out, he began hammering again.

  It’s what Carrie believes that matters just now. Whatever other madness was twisting the world, that at least made terrible sense. If she believed she could draw down divine inspiration by a rite of black magic, she’d perform it. And that would mean more death.

  It seemed like an age, though it was probably only a few minutes, before the hammering ceased again and Eircheard came back around the building. Opening the door to the van, he leaned against the vehicle’s side. He was holding the bag with the folderful of papers. Lady Nairn pressed something into my hand. I looked down. It was an iPod. “When you have time, just pop it off ‘hold’ and push ‘play.’”

  “Lady Nairn”—I faltered—“forty-eight hours isn’t much time.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “find Lily,” she said. “But Carrie can’t be allowed to have that manuscript.”

  “How—”

  She shook her head. “I’ll do everything in my power to help you.”

  “Get the police in on this, too,” I said. “The more people looking for her, the better.”

  “No,” she said vehemently. “That woman will crucify you, given half a chance, and get Lily killed. There’s no good that will come of going to the police, I’m afraid. If anyone can find her, Kate, you will.” She passed her hand over my head in benediction. “Blessed be,” she said, and smiled. “It’s the witches’ farewell.”