“Hey, mister,” said a blue-jeaned and T-shirted woman over the heads of her two staring children. “Are you pretending to be one of the English soldiers?”
“Madame,” Alasdair replied with the cool courtesy Jean recognized only too well, “I’m not pretending to be anything.”
Two other well-dressed couples from the reception took their places and the bus rumbled off. In the darkness, its windows reflected its interior and Jean saw little more outside than the lights of Merchant’s Square, Henry Street, and the Visitor Center, where the other couples exited, leaving her and Alasdair alone. Any other time she’d have suggested leaping off the bus and raiding the excellent bookstore inside the Center, but not now. Now she kept her eyes averted, ostensibly staring through the window, when in reality she was watching his reflection, a half-eroded cameo against the night.
She didn’t know whether she was more irritated with Stephanie Venegas—maybe she was protecting her turf, maybe she was one of Jessica’s uber-feminist fellow travelers, maybe she thought abrupt was synonymous with professional—or with Alasdair himself.
It wasn’t that he was irritated because Venegas was a woman. When it came to the gender wars, he was a conscientious objector. He was irritated because even if he could have told her more about the events at Blair Castle than she already knew from the official bulletin, which he couldn’t, this was Williamsburg’s patch, and she was on the case. And on the case of Wesley Hagedorn’s inauspicious death as well, if the mud on her shoes was any indication—she must have come straight from the crime scene at the pond.
Jean was on her own case. “The woman didn’t have to be so abrupt about protecting her territory. And you can’t follow up the investigation in Perthshire because you’re on holiday here.” When he didn’t answer, she went on, “Yes, this is similar to what happened in August. We’ve been there, we’ve done that. Do we have to go there and do it again?”
“When we first met, last May was it?”
Five years ago, it seemed. Her entire marriage hadn’t lasted as long as the past six months. “Yes.”
“You were having second thoughts about your new job. Your new life. You were wondering what you’d got ahold of. You thought maybe you’d gone and sold out. You were saying as much to Finch.”
Maybe she was past the second thoughts. Maybe she was still checking it all out, plumbing the depths, walking the maze, pounding her head against castle walls. “You haven’t sold anything out, Alasdair. Sometimes I think you’ve gone into debt.”
“To you, like as not.”
“I can’t take either the blame or the credit for your retirement. All I did was use my contacts to find you a new job.”
“And I’m grateful.” His chuckle was flavored more with vinegar than whiskey, but it was a chuckle. He took her hand and tucked it next to the warm wool pleats of his kilt.
A new driver bounded onto the bus. “How you folks doing this evening?”
“Very well, thank you,” said Alasdair. “We’ve booked a table at Campbell’s Tavern.”
“We’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” the driver replied, and sure enough, within moments Alasdair and Jean were creaking up the tall wooden steps of the old house and giving their names to the hostess in her mobcap and apron. She led them into the candlelit, food-scented, voice-murmuring gloom inside.
“The tavern belonged to Christiana Campbell, probably not related to Michael at all,” Jean said as Alasdair held her chair at their designated table. “Still, it’s proof of what Mrs. Finch was saying, that the Scots got around.”
“Poverty drives folk from their home ground.” He sat down opposite.
“Lots of emigrants indentured themselves, sold themselves into servitude, just to make it over here. I sure hope they weren’t expecting streets paved with gold. Or even streets, for that matter. Ah, thank you.” Jean accepted a menu from the waiter, a man in knee breeches, long tunic, and white neckcloth whose ancestors had probably been sold to the greedy colonial labor market, too, but not with a contract covering a finite term of work. No matter how brutal the conditions, indentured servants, Scots, English, whatever, had some hope of release.
Their small, rather battered wooden table was tucked into a corner, blocking an empty fireplace that exhaled a cool, sooty breath. If they had some of Harry Potter’s Floo powder, Jean thought, she and Alasdair could whisk themselves back to Edinburgh. Only to jostle each other around her flat, cheek by jowl, elbow to elbow, familiarity breeding—not contempt, not at all. The friction of familiarity rubbing a blister, one that would make a tender spot all the more sensitive.
She angled her menu toward the candle that gleamed behind its curvaceous glass cover, and ordered fried chicken and spoon bread while Alasdair ordered crab cakes. Wine? Why sure.
The room filled with other diners, presumably the evening’s second shift. A couple took the next table, he in black tie, she in black chiffon—oh, it was Louise Dietz, the woman who’d collided with Alasdair at the exhibit. Everyone nodded in polite but distant recognition and turned back to bread plates and butter pats.
“Please tell me, Denny, that you’re not going to waste your time with Jessica’s lecture tomorrow night,” Louise said to her companion.
The man sucked on his moustache and allowed, “It might be amusing. She says she uncovered a new primary source during her sabbatical.”
“Sabbatical? When she moved down from Charlottesville in May, you mean, and started crowding Matt in his own lecture hall. Any sources she found on the way were on a rotating rack at a gas station along I-64.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s building her whole argument on the equivalent, some sevenTEENTH-century laundry list, smoke, and mirrors.”
“No wonder she’s gotten herself sued. Yeah, Sharon Dingwall would have been brought up on charges of witchcraft during the colonial era, but no need to risk your reputation getting into it with nutcases like her and her husband.”
A new primary source? Jean repeated to herself. What—an original letter or diary? She made a mental note to attend Jessica’s lecture.
Alasdair’s dryly entertained stare crossed hers and she shrugged. Yes, their neighbors’ conversation reminded her why she’d left academia. Still she felt a twinge of nostalgia—like taking a cold shower, academic infighting felt so good when it stopped.
Silverware chimed, plates clinked, wonderful odors wafted by and a fiddler played a couple of Scottish reels that had evolved between the Auld Sod and Appalachia to something edgier, higher-strung, almost off-key. The waiter materialized, opening a bottle. Jean sipped. The wine was fresh and clean, a pale shimmer in her glass, scouring away the bitter tastes of antique poverty and modern ambition both.
With it she ate sweet potato muffins, hot rich spoon bread like corn pudding, and crispy succulent chicken. She traded a thigh for a bite of crab cake, redolent of spices and the sea. In the dim light, through the soft-focus lens of the wine, the room seemed more dream than reality. The dark pupils of Alasdair’s eyes almost swallowed the blue irises, reflecting the candle flame when he looked up at her. Dim light was romantic, wasn’t it? Bright-adapted eyes could sometimes see too much.
What she saw now were his features eased and his lips glistening with oil. A holiday. Yes, this was a holiday, never mind assorted Dingwalls and Finches and sordid tales of witchcraft.
“That chap Finch,” Alasdair said, holiday or no holiday, “looks to have his back to the wall, trapped by three strong-minded women. They make them strong-minded here, I’m thinking.”
I was made here, Jean thought. “Are the Finch women Macbeth’s three witches? Maiden, mother, crone, the ancient triple goddess. Who could be pretty nasty. Except I like Barbara, and I don’t know either Jessica or Rachel well enough to dislike them, first impressions notwithstanding.”
“He was blathering on about his ex, wasn’t he now?”
“That’s not unusual. Most people say they’re not going to talk about her
or him any more and then go right on talking, working it all out.”
“I never talk about my ex,” Alasdair said.
“It would have been helpful if you’d said something about her,” replied Jean, a bit too quickly. Damn the wine, loosening her tongue and unlacing her inhibitions. To Alasdair’s sharp glance upwards she added, “I don’t talk about my ex, either, but it took so long to get uncoupled from him I think I exhausted all the possible topics before we met. Before you and I met.”
“There you are, then. It’s all been said. By us, though not by Finch, or so it seems.” Alasdair placed his knife and fork on his empty plate and swirled the last of the wine, his hands that could have easily crushed the glass holding it as lightly as a soap bubble.
Her tongue ran on—but then, why should she mince words with Alasdair, being so strong-minded? “Cut him some slack. The guy’s lost his wife and might lose his job. Yes, he can hire on with the media company, it’s not like he was fired. But I know how it is, once you burn your bridges with the tenure committee, there’s no going back. Which is the meaning of burning your bridges.”
“In another minute you’ll be saying, it’s an academic thing, I’ll not understand.”
Police departments had their own tangled politics, she knew that. But there was nothing like the jungles of Academe, not just your average campus but the national and international jungles, where five-hundred-pound silverbacks picked the fruit from grants and endowments and scratched their bellies, while tiny rodents nipped mouthfuls of the peels and each other, then skittered for cover. “You’ve been known to imply that it’s a police matter and I wouldn’t understand.”
“You haven’t always, have you?”
“Then maybe you should cut me some slack.”
He gazed at her—look who’s talking—until she ducked, directing her attention to her plate and the pile of chicken bones, a savory charnel house. Only then did he say softly, “Maybe we should be minding why we’re here. Why we’re no longer working as academic or police.”
“Yeah,” she said. “A second start can be a very good thing.”
In their former lives, she and Alasdair had both made impossible decisions in defense of justice, decisions leaving embers that eventually led to burning out, burning bridges. Burning up the not-exactly-marital bed, which had its compensations. Still . . .
Alasdair sat back in his chair as the waiter cleared away the dishes and asked, “Would you folks like dessert? How about some coffee?”
Jean scanned the smaller menu. The offerings that weren’t loaded with sugar were loaded with cream. “Would you like to share a piece of chess pie?”
“Chess pie? Some sort of sweet tart? Aye, if you like. No coffee, though, thank you just the same.”
“Me neither,” Jean told the waiter, and as he walked away said, “It might keep me awake.”
Alasdair smiled, recognizing her words from an earlier occasion, one freighted with more emotional baggage than this one.
No, freighted with another kind of emotional baggage. Once you’d broken the barrier of physical intimacy, you discovered different kinds of intimate barriers behind it. The flesh was a portal, not an end in itself.
She hadn’t wanted another relationship. He hadn’t wanted another one. But each—call it heart, and not Jessica’s lace-edged ones—had compelled the other in spite of burned fingertips and frayed emotions. This relationship had to work. And yet Alasdair didn’t want, didn’t deserve, someone clinging to him and bleating about “has to.” How much could you invest in a relationship without losing yourself?
The waiter set down a generous yellow wedge topped with whipped cream. “Ah,” Alasdair said once the man’s back was turned. “I was expecting some sort of chocolate and vanilla checkerboard design. Chess. Knights, bishops, pawns.”
“And the queen is all-powerful.”
Letting that comment pass, he sliced off a small bite of the pie, placed it in his mouth, and chewed. “Lemon curd with texture.”
“Some say the derivation is ‘cheese pie’, others that it’s ‘chest pie’, a heavy pie that will keep a long time in a food chest or press. The texture is from cornmeal. Ground-up maize, to you Brits.”
“A food coffer?” he suggested. “Like Charlotte Murray’s marriage coffer.”
The lemon custard melted in her mouth and teased her throat, while the slight grit of the cornmeal mitigated the sugary, creamy richness. “Coffer, chest, box, the Scots kist—the ark of the Covenant, for that matter—they’re all containers. So is the human body.” That was another effect of the wine, if not the wine alone, that melting feeling in the pit of her stomach, the craving for Alasdair’s meticulously sensuous touch.
He pushed the plate toward her, for her to finish. She did, while he rummaged in his sporran to find his wallet and pay the bill. They’d have to settle up once they got back to Edinburgh. Funny how uncomplicated her first relationship seemed now, begun when she and Brad had had neither property nor independence.
The academics at the next table started a second bottle of wine, or perhaps whine. Louise leaned cozily across her empty plate, her glasses riding down her nose. “. . . speaking of conspiracy theories, here’s one. Tell me why the college hired Jessica let’s-just-make-up-a-new-name to begin with.”
“Smoke and mirrors,” Denny said again, refilling her glass. “She has the negatives. Not for us to know the reason why.”
“If you ask me, they’re hoping for some revelation in that source of hers, Nathaniel Bacon was gay, I don’t know. If she doesn’t come through, she’s sunk.”
Did Jessica’s new source deal with Bacon’s Rebellion? Jean wondered. But that wasn’t her field. Had she found a new account of a trial for witchcraft connected to one side or the other of the struggle?
Jean wended her way between the tables and out the front door before she laughed. “How well I remember that sort of circular dialog, counting coup on some hapless colleague every turn around the stadium. The Colosseum. Intellectual gladiatorial combat.”
“The blether in the police canteen wasn’t so different, though it turned on clues, cases—reality, not hot air.”
She glanced sharply at him. He didn’t realize he’d just insulted her. But they didn’t need to revisit that site, either.
“Shall we walk back to the house?”
“Yes, please.” With the interior of the building so dark, she didn’t have to wait for her eyes to adjust to the night. Its sudden chill raised gooseflesh on her arms. The steps were steep and her knees a little wobbly. Jean supposed she’d never be able to drink without the alcohol going to her knees. Who needed a Breathalyzer, when you had knees?
Alasdair offered her his arm and gratefully she took it. Safely across the street, they crunched from light-puddle to light-puddle up the path paved with broken oyster shells toward the Capitol. Its blunt cupola rose against the starry sky like the admonitory finger of government. Alasdair asked, “Who was Nathaniel Bacon? A relation of Francis Bacon’s?”
“No, although the Dingwalls and their ilk claim that he was. He was a young, brash Virginia landowner who rebelled against Governor Berkeley in 1676. The political situation was murky, but basically a lot of it went back to the Civil War in England, with supporters of the monarchy coming over here and lying low until the Restoration. Speaking of crime scenes, things got brutal for awhile. Then Bacon died of a fever.”
“Or was he assassinated?”
“There you go, Dingwalling me.” Laughing, they strolled around the side of the Capitol, past the regular Georgian arches now filled with shadow. If Jean hadn’t known that the building was a reconstruction, she would have imagined the ghosts of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson walking the corridors, the echoes of their voices filling the darkened chambers. Or perhaps their ghosts were there anyway, evoked by place and intent and belief.
Leaning on each other, they started along the sidewalks lining Duke of Gloucester Street, where the bricks were kicked up by the r
oots of trees and tilted by extremes of heat and frost. Overarching tree branches strewed leaves onto the pavement, to swirl in gusts of cold wind. Shop signs swayed and creaked. The street, lined with the faint verticals and horizontals of buildings, the rectangles of illuminated windows and shuttered doors, like an exercise in perspective dwindled into the lights of Merchant’s Square and the college almost a mile away. Even further, a siren wailed and a dog set up a complementary howl.
Jean wondered if Alasdair was thinking the same thing she was, about an ambulance crew trying to revive Wesley Hagedorn’s inert body. Or perhaps his colleague’s discovery had come too late, and it was the crime scene crew who had carried him away, without benefit of siren. And now he lay in the morgue, waiting for the touch of cold steel, the final violation of an unexplained—even if not malicious—death.
A human shape stepped out of a dark alcove, the bright point of a cigarette indicating a mouth. Oh—it was only a custodian, his cart of cleaning supplies and trash containers camouflaged by shadow.
A group of people strolled up the middle of the pedestrianized street, safe from cars if not from piles of horse droppings. Their guide, a woman in colonial garb holding a lantern, was intoning, “. . . they say she still walks the night.” A shiver ran through the group, cold, dark, fear, a good ghost story—a good shiver, soon to be dispelled by spirits distilled rather than legendary.
From inside Chowning’s Tavern came the sound of laughter and music, a mandolin, perhaps, and a woman singing, “Early one morning, just as the sun was rising . . .”
Alasdair tugged Jean gently to the left, toward the path behind the Magazine and their home away from home. The fire basket they’d seen earlier was now only a dull ember or two and a hint of acrid smoke. Not one human figure moved through the shifting shadows.
“The place really clears out at night, doesn’t it?” Jean’s own breath created a wraith in front of her face.
Charm Stone Page 6
