Dust to Dust

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  The cat’s whiskers went on the alert. A flood of children, one on a skateboard and two whooping behind, swept down the sidewalk. Lancelot did an Olympic backward somersault and hit the ground running. Guinevere’s white paws scrabbled for purchase on the hood of the car, then shot off after him.

  Michael’s hands still held a cat shape. “And there’s the rest of the Johnstons… . Aaah, she scratched my bonnet!” He bent solicitously over the car’s gleaming hood, his fingertip rubbing out Guinevere’s tracks.

  Rebecca turned away, smothering her laugh—men! Just past the bulk of the Craft Centre was the entrance to a driveway. At its end was the cottage, nesting on the banks of the stream. Two hundred years old, Michael had said. But it, too, gleamed with whitewash, even as the lichen-stained slates of the roof added character.

  “I’ll walk,” Rebecca called. She crossed the street and traipsed down the driveway. Behind the Craft Centre was a fenced in area. Black-faced sheep peered incuriously at her as she walked by.

  The first key she tried opened the door facing toward the village. She entered a vestibule lined with coat pegs, then went through a glass door into a hallway. To her right was a sitting room complete with fireplace, television set, and comfortable chairs. The next door opened onto a bedroom.

  Opposite the sitting room was a dining room, and beyond that a kitchen glistening with Scandinavian-style cabinets and counter tops. She looked askance at the propane-fired Aga cooker, a massive piece of iron with lids that raised to expose bare, searing hot, metal. It stayed on all day, Michael had assured her, heating the water as well as providing warmth. The window over the sink looked straight across the stream to the priory.

  Upstairs were two more bedrooms, huge closets, and a large bathroom. Back downstairs Rebecca found another bathroom just off the rear entry, along with a miniature washer and dryer. She visualized quarrels over laundry rights and vowed to start sign-up sheets immediately.

  The front door crashed open, and Michael appeared carrying several plastic bags of groceries. “Which room do you want, hen?” he asked jovially, plunking his burden down on the counter.

  “The downstairs one would be more private. But don’t you people believe in double beds?”

  “No in holiday hire houses, I suppose.” He steered her back through the dining room to the bedroom and inspected the two-foot gap between the beds. “Dinna worry, love. That’s no so far across as the Atlantic.”

  She hugged him. “Promise I won’t get cold at night?”

  “I promise.” She’d always been impressed how Michael could kiss her and laugh at the same time.

  Over his shoulder the window opened onto the same view as the one from the kitchen. A man was walking across the lawn beside the church, stopping every now and then to poke at bits of broken masonry with his toe.

  Michael turned to see what she was looking at. “Guid. A victim for Laurence. Let’s go tell him aboot Nora’s scones.”

  “Are you questioning Laurence’s motives?”

  “Economic power makes the world go around. If naebody paid us for muckin’ aboot in dust and mud, we’d be packin’ herring or—what do you say, slingin’ hash?”

  “I’ve done enough of that, thank you.” She squeezed him again and something squashed between them. The matchbook in her pocket. She pulled it out, didn’t see a wastebasket, and tossed it onto the dressing table.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a stray matchbook. Picked it up off the attic floor.”

  “Always tidyin’,” Michael chided. “If you can possibly tear yoursel’ away, how aboot a wee dander through the priory?”

  “A stroll?” she translated. “Wonderful.”

  Michael bowed and offered her his arm. Together they walked out of the house and toward the footbridge over the Gowan Water.

  1

  Chapter Four

  The Gowan Water sparkled and burbled over its rocky bed. Willow branches waded in the stream and leaves rustled in the breeze. The solitary tourist was nowhere in sight.

  Michael and Rebecca paused on the footbridge and looked upstream to where the bridge that carried the modern road arched over the mossy piers of its 14th century predecessor. “There,” Michael said, “by the old ford, the first prioress, Marjory Douglas, the first prioress, found her lover’s body.”

  Rebecca leaned on the railing, the sun warm on her back. The murmur of wind and water muffled the voices and slamming doors of the village, sealing the priory in its own secret bubble of time and space. “The rest of his body, you mean? That was downright sadistic, her brothers killing William Salkeld simply because he was English. And then presenting poor Marjory with his heart on a spear!”

  “Marjory’s family wanted her to marry some neighborin’ landowner to extend their own holdin’s. That was why they killed William—greed, no ideology. But Marjory took her dowry to the church. Poetic justice.”

  “No wonder she thought God sent her to Rudesburn, with William dying right on its doorstep. People have always tried to find some higher purpose in human bloody-mindedness.” She shook her head with a rueful smile. “The day I got that copy of Pringle’s history I dreamed my brothers were after you. Except they were dressed as cowboys, not knights.”

  “No so keen, are they, at your takin’ up wi’ a foreigner?”

  “I don’t think they care one way or the other. You’re just another one of my delusions, like getting a Ph.D.” Again she took Michael’s arm.

  “Thank you,” he said, and patted her hand warily.

  On the far side of the church, the man they’d seen from the cottage strode toward the parking area, presenting them with a generic jeans-and-jacket clad back. He disappeared behind the remaining stretch of the perimeter wall, and a moment later the sudden revving of an engine sent pigeons spinning away from the eaves of the church. Gravel spattered, and the sound of the car dwindled. Rebecca sighed. “Shoot. The customer that got away.”

  “We’ll have the place to oursel’s then,” Michael said. They walked across the bridge and stepped onto the springy grass.

  “Is that where the name comes from?” Rebecca asked. “That skirmish between the Douglases and the Salkelds couldn’t have been the first one here. Why else call that hill ‘Battle Law’? Maybe ‘Rudesburn’ came from the Gaelic word ruadh, red. Poets say the stream flowed red with blood.”

  “Good theory, except they spoke Brittonic in these airts.” He nodded at the tall wheel-headed cross standing before the west door of the church. “See, the rood is as much Northumbrian scrollwork as Celtic interlace. It’s your own name that comes from ruadh.”

  “Well, yes, my great-grandfather the immigrant had flaming red hair. I’m sorry it disappeared from the family.”

  “Recessive gene. All you need is a fresh infusion.” Michael tossed his head. In the sunlight, his brown hair had a distinct gleam of red. “Maddy has chestnut hair,” he added, as if he were applying for a genetics test. Rebecca acknowledged his inference with a grin.

  Despite its age, the cross sprang straight and proud from the turf. Its carved straps, knots, and mythological animals had been smoothed by centuries of weather into organic shapes like muscles flexing just beneath stone skin. Rebecca laid her palm flat against the rock. It was warm. She could almost have convinced herself it was humming, vibrantly alert, noticing but not commenting on the pageant of war and peace played out before it. “Then ‘Rudesburn’ is from ‘rood’ and ‘burn’.”

  “The cross beside the stream.” Michael, too, laid his hand on the stone. He smiled, as though it tickled his fingertips. “Probably Irish monks carved it when they set up cells on the Law. See the boss in the cross-head, and the decoration on the shaft face runnin’ on up onto the head wi’oot a separation. Ninth century, at the least. Temptin’ to think it was once a standin’ stone markin’ a prehistoric sacred site.”

  “Very tempting.” Rebecca agreed. “I suppose that nick out of the top was made by some gun-happy henchman of Cromwel
l’s in the 1600’s.”

  “The Puritans were scairt of bonny things, said they distracted you from worship. I’d take the opposite view, mysel’.”

  “Definitely.”

  Through the wide doorway in the western wall of the church the grass was just as lush, even though it was now barred by the shadows of the remaining vaults and window tracery. “Mind your step,” said Michael.

  “I see them.” Rebecca skirted three stone sarcophagi sunk into the ground, their interiors carved in human shapes and thoughtfully provided with drains. Their occupants had once been laid beneath the flagstoned floor of the nave. Hopefully they’d been long gone when religiously reformed Rudesburners had turned the priory into a handy-dandy local quarry. She visualized zealots breaking the windows and standing with smug self-righteousness as the multicolored glass rained down. She saw them slaughtering those who disagreed with their revealed truth of how many angels danced on the head of a pin… . Not only the reformers did that. People had been murdering each other over religion for thousands of years.

  “It’s not that I can’t understand why people die for their faith,” she mused aloud. “I can’t understand why other people kill for theirs.”

  “Is there ever any excuse to kill?” Michael asked softly.

  She looked at his solemn face. That was one question she couldn’t answer. She took his hand. “Benedicite,” she said, although she wasn’t sure just for whom she was asking the blessing.

  He squeezed her hand in return. “Deo gratias.”

  A lark swooped beneath the vaulting, its song mitigating the sudden silence, and landed on the shattered sill of the rood screen. “You’re a good Presbyterian boy,” Rebecca teased, “quoting ecclesiastical Latin at me.”

  “I’ve mucked aboot in the Middle Ages long enough to appreciate the liturgy. A Catholic mother dinna make you one, hen.”

  “Most of the time my mother was too tired and disillusioned to practice any religion—like the Puritans, maybe. We’re children of a profane society.”

  “Who respect the sacred,” Michael concluded. “If we ken what’s good for us.”

  The south side of the nave was closed by a row of narrow, carved pillars. Behind them was an aisle centered on a tomb. Michael and Rebecca paused beside the weathered effigy of William Salkeld. His face was a textured lump, his hands holding his sword a suggestion of human form. For being considerably younger than the standing cross, the tomb carvings were in much worse shape. The cross, Rebecca thought, must be made of much harder stone. Why, even the top of the tomb was skewed to one side… .

  “Look there!” She dropped to her knees and inspected the overhanging rim of the lid. Freshly gouged grooves stood out white and stark against the soft gray of the stone. “Vandals?”

  “Grave robbers, more likely. Bluidy idiots. Pringle’s history says in so many words the tomb was looted and emptied in the sixteenth century. And Kerr affirmed that it was empty only fifty years ago.”

  “How many people have access to those references?” Rebecca asked. “That man who was walking around here… . Not that it would’ve been easy for him to hide a crowbar in his pocket.”

  “Could’ve been done any time this week. I’ll mention it to Grant and Laurence. All this publicity for the dig’s no attractin’ the kind of business they wanted, is it?” He shoved at the effigy, but the lid wouldn’t move. “We’ll get some tools and set you to rights,” he told the out of focus face.

  William Salkeld didn’t respond. Perhaps the sole purpose of his short, tragic life had been to bring Marjory Douglas to God and to Rudesburn. Unlike Adele’s obsessed ghosts, he had no reason to linger.

  The remains of a pitch pine roof, dating from the nineteenth century when the church had been the local parish of the Church of Scotland, extended from the tower to cover the chancel and the choir. Here the grass stopped. Rebecca’s sneakers crunched over tiles and flags jumbled in a gray, brown, and rose mosaic. Beneath the tower she peered through a grille into a spiral staircase, the steps hollowed from centuries of ascending and descending feet. “Keep out,” read a neatly lettered sign. “Danger. Unstable masonry.”

  “Time for some preservation work.” Michael scraped at the stone beside the door. “Colin says the older parts of the priory are built of agglomerate, the newer parts of sandstone, probably from the same quarries on the Eildons that Morrow used for Melrose.”

  “Wouldn’t it’ve been easier to use stone from Battle Law? Both the castle and the first Priory went up about the same time, didn’t they?”

  “Aye, eleventh century. The castle was built of Law stone. But Colin says it’s some kind of igneous stuff, harder than the priory masons wanted.” He pointed to the fine fluted molding edging the chancel arch.

  The transepts were lined with empty alcoves, like staring eye sockets, that had once been chapels to the many saints Marjory venerated. Another doorway was blocked with rubble that slumped wearily against several restraining boards. “That was a stairway doon to the crypt,” Michael explained. “Ceilin’ collapsed back in the thirties. A shame—Kerr left a nice map. Something else for us to set to rights.”

  “I wonder if Marjory’s relics were destroyed like so many were at the time of the Reformation.”

  “Good question. She had a top-hole collection of relics, no doot aboot it. Why else was the place one of the richest in the Borders, all the poor sick folk comin’ to ask the relics for miracle cures?”

  “Why else,” asked Rebecca, “did Henry VIII loot the convent during Anne Douglas’s time?”

  “Vanity and greed,” Michael answered.

  Rebecca scuffed at the fine dust, the texture of ashes, that mottled the floor. The building was tangible memory, not quite real. The moldings on windows and chancel arch were weathered and chipped, only hinting their original delicacy. The shattered remains of the rood screen, the hacked block of stone that had once held the altar, the scraped and graffiti-fouled piers supporting the roof vaulting—all was suggestion, not statement. The building lacked the animation of a living presence, of song and praise.

  The sun sank and the shadow of the west front crept over the floor, leaving Rebecca in dim coolness. The air was filled with that odor of ancient sanctity she usually found so comforting, dust and must and an elusive sweetness that could have been either incense or decay. But at Rudesburn that air made her uneasy. The chill wind that tickled the back of her neck was not a sigh of peace but a groan of sorrow and pain.

  She scurried out the closest doorway behind Michael and found herself back in the sunlight. She would have chided herself for an overactive imagination, but she’d learned the hard way to trust her intuition. “No wonder people think the place is haunted,” she commented.

  “Peace only an illusion?” Michael’s mouth tightened, and his brows signaled a silent message—here we go again.

  Rebecca took a few steps toward the thick, dark branches of a yew tree, its fronds drooping over rows of headstones. Just beside her was a flat stone, its edges concealed by encroaching turf, an incised skull and the date 1697 barely visible. Beyond that a polished granite St. Andrews cross bore the legend, “Francis Pringle Kerr, 1882-1968”. The cemetery with its recent graves was outside the boundaries of the dig.

  Michael turned away from the graves and looked toward the shops and houses on the other side of the burn. A car came through the village, picked up speed when it reached the bridge, and zoomed away behind the convent wall. The twentieth century thrust itself into the fourteenth, and the secret bubble of space and time surrounding Rudesburn popped and dissipated.

  Rebecca and Michael looked at each other and laughed. Hand in hand, they walked behind the church and around the remains of the convent. The walls of the chapter house still stood, supported by metal braces, and the cloister garth remained a pristine lawn. Most of the other buildings were defined only by collapsed walls almost covered with hogweed, nettles, wild roses, and the daisies that gave Gowandale its name. In the shade the s
tones were painted with a fluorescent green moss that animation studios would have a hard time replicating. South of the ruins was a well, now closed by an iron lattice and a padlock considerably larger than the one on the display case.

  Michael glanced up at Battle Law. “Dinna look noo, but we’re bein’ followed.”

  Rebecca looked. Lancelot and Guinevere were oozing from bush to stone to carved block, their golden eyes winking, their ears pricked and alert. She crossed the footbridge, sensing those curious and yet indifferent feline eyes on the back of her neck.

  She and Michael had barely stowed the groceries and started unloading their suitcases when voices echoed through the open windows. Rebecca set her new wellies in the vestibule and looked out the door past the gleaming hood of the Fiat. A blue and white bus had just pulled away from the hotel. Four people were walking down the driveway. “They’re here!” she called.

  Rebecca recognized Adele’s gray hair and glasses and Dennis’s rotund figure. By process of elimination, then, the woman in the exquisitely-tailored tweed jacket was Hilary Chase, and the man with the silver belt buckle and a guitar case was Mark Owen. Did he intend his short dark hair to stand spikily on end like that, Rebecca wondered, or was it that the wind was picking up? A look upward confirmed that clouds were scudding in from the west. Oh good. They’d be starting the dig in the rain.

  Introductions took only a moment, and a quick tour of the house another few. When Michael finished demonstrating the Aga cooker, everyone continued to stand awkwardly in the kitchen. It was Dennis who broke the silence. “We’ve got three men, three women, and three bedrooms. Should we draw straws?” He glanced from Rebecca to Hilary with a leer that on his guileless face looked more like, “What, me worry?”

  Michael said firmly, “Rebecca and I’ll be sharin’ the room on the ground floor. I suggest that Adele and Hilary take one of the first floor rooms and Dennis and Mark the other. There’s plenty of cupboard space.”