Shadows in Scarlet

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  But now she was sitting in yet another window seat, staring out at a hypnotic scene of blue sky above and billows of gray and white cloud below. She might as well be flying over the Sahara… . No. The plane was descending. The clouds parted, revealing a glittering blue sea and hills so green and cool her heart leaped with joy. Scotland. It had taken comedy and tragedy both to bring her here, but here she was at last.

  James had spent weeks, maybe even months, making the same trip. And she’d done it in a matter of hours. Of course the price for speed was jet lag. Amanda yawned and collected her stuff.

  Inverness Dalcross read the sign on the terminal. Ceud Mille Failte. Inside the waiting crowd was a blur of sweaters and ruddy cheeks. There, a hand was holding up a piece of cardboard reading Williamsburg. Thank goodness for a native guide.

  The hand belonged to a slightly built man of somewhere between forty and sixty. His head was a classic egg shape, silver hair angling across a broad brow, narrow chin disappearing into the houndstooth scarf tucked into his coat collar. His pale eyes searched the crowd with a benevolent curiosity that made Amanda smile. Malcolm Grant. Just about what she’d expected, once she’d pared away all the flights of fancy. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Amanda Witham from Williamsburg.”

  He tucked the sign under his arm and shook Amanda’s hand. His hand was fragile, more suited to a pen than to either sword or plowshare. “How do you do, Miss Witham. I believe there’s to be a gentleman as well?”

  “Mr. Chancellor decided not to come. I’m alone. You haven’t gotten a call from him or his mother or anyone?”

  “Oh no, no one’s rung me, sorry.”

  Amanda wondered just what was going on back at stately Chancellor manor. Then she decided she didn’t care. “I have a suitcase and the crate with the—er—remains.”

  “Well then, we’d best be off to the luggage carousel.” Mr. Grant took her camera bag and tried to take her carry-on as well, but she hung onto that—the cameras alone made him sag visibly.

  He led the way down a corridor, asking about her flight and whether she’d visited Britain before—all the usual courtesies. His accent was only mildly Scottish, the odd burred R and compressed vowel clinging to standard Oxbridge English. He’d probably spent years studying south of the border. Why Cynthia had made that snide remark about his accent Amanda couldn’t fathom.

  The wooden crate and the suitcase were there, much to Amanda’s relief. She waved off Mr. Grant’s help and wrestled them onto yet another luggage cart. He insisted on pushing. The cool, damp outside air was like a splash of fresh water on Amanda’s face.

  It took some maneuvering to get the packing case into the minuscule trunk of Grant’s car and to wedge the suitcase into the back seat, but at last he was opening a door and bowing Amanda inside. He expected her to drive? Oh. The steering wheel was on the right. She knew that.

  She clambered in, wrapped the seat belt around her chest and waist, and braced herself. Even so, the turn out of the parking lot made her cringe. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought that bus was going to run right into us.”

  “Drive on the other side of road, do you?”

  “Afraid so. This takes …” The car spun into a traffic circle and Amanda closed her eyes. When the centrifugal force let up she opened them again. They were back on the straightaway, passing green pastures tufted with black-faced sheep. “This takes a bit of getting used to.”

  “I should imagine so.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting your mother,” Amanda went on. “Cynthia—Mrs. Chancellor—had tea with her in London.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The pale eyes flicked confusedly in her direction.

  “Lady Norah. Or was Cynthia just making that up?”

  “Oh my goodness!” He threw his head back, laughing so heartily the scarf slipped away from his throat and revealed a clerical collar. “I’m so sorry, Miss Witham, I never introduced myself, did I? I’m Lindley Duncan, rector of St. Columba’s C. of E. church in Invermoriston.”

  “Oh,” said Amanda. If yesterday she’d been moving on fast forward, today she was thinking in slow motion.

  “That’s Church of England in Scotland. We’re not all Presbyterians in these parts. The Dundreggan Grants especially, being made of stubborn stuff. The family motto isn’t ‘Stand Fast’ for nothing.”

  “‘Stand Fast.’ Yes, that’s on the badge on the scabbard.”

  “Malcolm couldn’t collect you, there’s a spot of bother in the glen. And Norah’s expecting the stonemasons. I’m terribly sorry to have misled you.”

  “You didn’t mislead me, I just had it in my mind that Malcolm was …” Her tongue was thick. She tried again. “We got a copy of some historical notes from the museum in Edinburgh that looked like they’d been written a long time ago, and they were signed ‘Malcolm Grant.’”

  The reverend Mr. Duncan smiled and nodded. “That would have been Malcolm, Alex’s father. Alexander Lord Dundreggan, that is, who passed away several years ago. Malcolm was quite the genealogist. Gassed in the Great War, never quite the ticket after that, unfortunately, and so turned to sorting the family archives.”

  “The Grants have a history of military service?”

  “Every generation has a son in the military. Now it’s Archie. Archibald, as he’s known on Sunday.”

  That’s right, it was the earlier Archibald who’d generated the Grants, not James. Amanda shook her head, trying to jump-start her brain—but not too hard, in case she suddenly woke up in her bed in Melrose Hall. Another Archibald Grant. She imagined a distinguished Ministry of Defense type who would have had his rat namesake shot on sight.

  They entered the city of Inverness, passing a high-rise brick parking lot, a turreted Victorian train station, and tiny stone shops that had probably been hastily shuttered for the battle of Culloden, eight years before James’s birth. When Duncan stopped at a traffic light Amanda swiveled, goggle-eyed.

  A McDonalds, its plate glass window painted with yellow arches, was inserted into a hundred-year old facade. Several shops were draped with tartan fabrics and T-shirts reading, “I’m a Wee Monster from Loch Ness.” In the middle of the intersection stood a medieval stone market cross. The pedestrians looked like pedestrians anywhere—at least, somewhere cooler than Virginia. Old women wore frumpy headscarves and raincoats. Young men wore jeans, windbreakers, and a variety of bizarre haircuts.

  Amanda grinned. Here, time was relative. With its emphasis on one correct historical period, Williamsburg was starting to look bland.

  The light changed. The car moved on, across a river, down a road lined with buildings, and past a tall green mound circled with gravestones. “Tomnahurich,” Duncan explained. “The ancient meeting-place of the Frasers, now a cemetery.”

  James would recognize that, Amanda thought. “Is that where—James Grant’s bones, that is …”

  “No, we’ve arranged a burial service at Dundreggan chapel.”

  “That’s really nice.”

  “Seems only right the young man should come home after all this time.”

  Home with honor, Amanda repeated to herself. And suddenly, for the first time, she wondered what the Grants would think of the story of murder and betrayal she’d promised to tell.

  If the older Malcolm had found documentation detailing how James had really died, then the present generation already knew the truth. There was no reason they should take it personally. Some families might think a cattle rustler or a bank robber hanging from the family tree was exciting.

  But what if the older Malcolm hadn’t found the truth? Without documentation, Amanda could only offer the story as a theory. And who was she, anyway, to appear out of nowhere spouting bizarre theories that turned two hundred years of family history upside down? It wasn’t their fault who their ancestor was.

  During Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, she thought, the British bands had played “The World Turned Upside Down.”

  The car rumbled over a bridge cross
ing a canal and accelerated into the countryside. Sunshine broke through the clouds just as a body of water opened to the left. The water gleamed the blue-gray of James’s eyes. “Loch Ness?” Amanda asked, remembering the map in Carrie’s office.

  “That it is.”

  “Have you ever seen the monster?”

  “No,” Duncan said with a chuckle, “I haven’t seen the monster. It hardly matters, though, whether it’s there or not. By now the story’s taken on a life of its own. A lot of local people are making a good living from the legend, and it’s bringing pleasure to tourists and scientists the world over. As you might say about my profession, faith makes facts unnecessary.”

  Amanda glanced over at him. “The human mind is hard-wired with the need for myth?”

  “Hard-wired?”

  “Like read-only memory in a computer … Never mind. I think you’re right. Whether the story is true or not doesn’t make it any less legitimate.” Where that put James’s story she wasn’t sure.

  The loch grew wider and its banks higher. White houses perched on the slopes, bright against the green. The wake of a passing boat was a long V of foam against water whose darkness hinted at its depth.

  “I hope I’m not making any trouble for Lady Norah,” Amanda said. “I’ve never even talked to her myself.”

  “Don’t worry yourself. Norah’s related to the Grants and the Frasers herself. She and Malcolm are quite interested in Grant family history. The return of a prodigal son makes a fine footnote.”

  “A prodigal son?”

  “James Charles Edward Grant,” returned Duncan, with a nod toward the trunk of the car. “I would imagine he found his names to be a bit of a liability among his English friends.”

  “I never knew his middle names,” said Amanda. Had he been named for James, the Old Pretender, as well as James’s charming but feckless son Bonnie Prince Charlie? “Was James’s mother a daughter of old Lord Lovat?”

  “A granddaughter, actually, but the old scoundrel’s blood ran true in James. Quite the black sheep, he was. Good job young Lord Lovat had his regiment to hand, to give the lad a worthwhile occupation.”

  A black sheep? Amanda repeated silently. James, not Archibald? Not that she’d ever doubted James’s, well, high spirits. He didn’t smell like whiskey because he’d been a teetotaler. He wasn’t a smooth seducer because he’d been celibate. And his friends and relatives wouldn’t exactly have appreciated his short fuse. So he’d been human. But he’d served his time in purgatory. Purgatory having its moments, she thought with a tingle in more than the roots of her hair.

  Curving away from the loch, the road entered the village of Drumnadrochit. Tourist buses lined up outside a group of buildings labeled “The Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition”. Amanda could almost hear the camera shutters clicking as Duncan slowed to make a right angle turn around a war memorial.

  The road returned to the side of the loch above the tumbled red ruins of Urquhart Castle. A piper paced the parking lot, the wail of his bagpipes echoing across the water. Amanda shrugged—it was no hokier than Wayne in his curled wig and knee breeches.

  Here the road was hacked into a slope so steep that in places netting covered the bare rock face, keeping the boulders from falling onto the pavement. On the opposite side lay the loch. Amanda squinted between the tree trunks as they flashed by, not really expecting to see Nessie extend a flipper and wave.

  A huge black-winged creature dropped over the side of the embankment, hung in the air for half a heartbeat, then with a roar vanished up the loch. Amanda’s jaw dropped. No, it couldn’t have been a pterodactyl.

  “A Harrier jet,” Duncan said with a smile. “The pilots race up and down the water like things demented. I saw one tear up the loch at Glenfinnan once, almost took the top off the monument. Archie’s a Harrier pilot, in the Falklands now. I believe he’s the officer responsible for ordering the beer and the Mars Bars.”

  Archibald was a … Amanda tried rubbing her eye sockets. Duncan was talking about the existing Archibald.

  The minister saw her gesture. “We’re almost there. It’s getting on for noon. Norah said she’d ask Irene—the woman who does for her—to prepare one of her lovely salmon salads.”

  “That sounds great,” Amanda replied, not sure she’d be able to tell a salmon from a shoe. It might be almost noon here, but her internal clock was firmly convinced it was past five, quitting time, and her body was duly quitting. She yawned, almost splitting open her face.

  When she opened her eyes again the car was passing through Invermoriston, a village of white-painted houses. Duncan turned up a narrow road that led away from the loch, alongside a river burbling among huge boulders. A couple of miles further on Amanda’s sand-rimmed eyes snapped open at the roadside sign, “Dundreggan Castle.” Almost there. Almost home.

  The car nosed onto a one-lane road which climbed upward among rocky pastures and Scots pines standing like lonely sentinels. “The Victorians romanticized the old houses,” Duncan replied. “They tarted Dundreggan up a bit, but not enough to spoil it, fortunately. And they started calling it a castle. But, as you can tell by the name—’the fort of the dragon’—it was indeed fortified, many years and many modifications ago. Malcolm and Norah are working on a restoration program. I’m sure they’ll have quite a few questions about your work in Williamsburg.”

  “Anything I can do to earn my keep.” On a spur of land overlooking the river valley crouched a small stone building, the Celtic cross before its door directing the eye heavenward.

  “We’ll be having the burial services there on Saturday,” Duncan told Amanda. And, taking pity on her, added, “Today being Thursday.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” Amanda watched the chapel until it disappeared behind a green slope. When she faced forward again it was to see a stony embankment sprouting gray towers, chimneys, and walls. “Oh!”

  The car dived into an avenue lined with trees whose rushing shadows flickered bright and dark, bright and dark, making Amanda dizzy. One more turn, through an ancient stone gateway festooned with ivy and lichen, and there was Dundreggan, House or Castle, surrounded by gardens just as Amanda had imagined it. Except she’d pictured a structure along the lines of Windsor Castle. What she saw was a building little more than twice the size of Melrose, although considerably less symmetrical.

  It looked like Dundreggan had been accumulated rather than built. A central keep was flanked with wings, towers, and ells, by the size and shape of their windows dating from several different eras. The only common element was the slate roof, gleaming the deep gray-black of a thundercloud behind its crow-stepped gables. A white and blue Scottish flag fluttered from the topmost tower. The castle perched comfortably atop its hill, its irregularly spaced windows like bright eyes gazing over the countryside. Amanda thought of a dowager duchess, left behind by time and fashion but regretting nothing, and was enchanted.

  A black and white border collie loped toward the car. Two workmen looked up from a perimeter wall where they were substituting fresh blocks of silvery stone for weathered and discolored ones. Above and beyond the wall spread the sky, its crisp blue blending with the tender blue shades of distant mountains.

  Against the castle wall stood a gorgeous herbaceous border, flowers in every color of the rainbow rising from drifts of shining leaves. A woman in shapeless coveralls and green calf-high boots stood up, tossed down a trowel, and wiped her hands on her hips. The gardener? Amanda asked herself. Or, with any luck, Lady Norah herself?

  Duncan parked the car next to the mason’s panel van. He got out and rubbed the collie’s ears, murmuring, “Aren’t you a good boy, then?” The dog sat down politely, his tail scattering gravel.

  Amanda opened her door and stood. She was so limp the wind almost swept her off her feet. Her cotton skirt and jacket fluttered wildly. She took an enormous breath of the chilly air and its tang of—peat smoke? she wondered. Or was the air itself flavored with single malt? She felt halfway to plastered without hav
ing drunk a drop.

  The coveralled woman strode across a lawn that would have made a golf course’s groundskeeper cry. Her face was strong, square, and pink-cheeked from the wind and from her work, not cosmetics. “So, Lindley, you seem to have misplaced one of your flock.”

  “Mr. Chancellor decided not to come. This is Amanda Witham.”

  “How do you do,” said the woman. She extended her hand, saw how dirty it was, and snatched it back with a grin. “I’m Norah Grant.”

  Norah wasn’t one bit older than Cynthia, Amanda estimated, although she was taller, almost as tall as Amanda herself. “Amanda Witham. Thanks for taking me in—I feel like I was forced on you.”

  “Not a bit of it,” replied Norah. “You’re not what I expected. Mrs. Chancellor was chattering on about this sweet little child, her son’s fiancée, and I imagined you to be of doll-like proportions and all of sixteen. I don’t believe she even mentioned your name. Amanda. Lovely.”

  “She sees me as a doll,” Amanda returned. “Keeps me under control that way. And I’m not her son’s fiancée. That’s a big, big mistake.”

  “A proper cock-up?” Norah suggested with another grin.

  “Is it ever.” Amanda laughed. “And she hinted you were much older, I’m afraid. Genteel decay and everything.”

  “I wondered when I met her in London if Mrs. Chancellor has a background in the theatre.”

  “She should.” Amanda decided she liked Norah very much.

  Duncan had dragged the camera bag and suitcase from the car and was now trying to extract the crate. “Let me,” Amanda said, and helped him put it on the ground.

  “Is that the skeleton, then?” Norah asked. She picked up the suitcase and threw the camera bag over her shoulder like a sequined evening purse. “Come along, we’ll put him in the hall, it’s changed a bit since his day, but I daresay that won’t make any difference to him.”

  Yeah, well… . Amanda was beginning to appreciate James’s confusion when he found himself in a world not quite his own, even though his was temporal jet lag and hers was spatial.