Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “I’d enjoy hearing you play,” Jean replied.

  Barbara peered at Jean past the yellow and bronze petals, her eyes bright as a wood nymph’s. “You and the kilt, you’re helping the police chase down Wesley’s murderer.”

  “And Sharon Dingwall’s. That’s why we weren’t at the concert last night.” Jean made a feeble gesture toward the tree. The crime scene. The murder site.

  “I didn’t see you at the play, either.”

  “No. We couldn’t get tickets. I hope to read Jessica’s new book about Mary Napier, though.”

  “Her book’s about all the witches, not just Mary. All the witches who weren’t suffered to live as they pleased, to misquote the Bible. She sees witchcraft as a social issue, prejudice against women, trendy ideas about gender equality that would never have occurred to someone in that era.” Beneath the slight quaver of age in Barbara’s voice, steel clanged.

  “Do you think there was something to the charges of witchcraft, then?”

  “You want me to reference Shakespeare? There being more in heaven and earth than are dreamed in your philosophy, Horatio.”

  Jean nodded in unspecified agreement. This time her gesture was sideways, lofting over the roof of the church. “I was just looking at Robert Mason’s gravestone. Tim Dingwall thinks the inscription holds some sort of clue to the whole Bacon’s vault theory. Me, I’m wondering if Mason meant the design to refer to the Witch Box.”

  “Tim Dingwall’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.” The face behind the chrysanthemums puckered with a canny smile. “Mason, now, Mason was a curious man, like Jefferson but in his own way. If he’d lived in Massachusetts in 1692, he’d have been strung up, and nothing about being a victim of gender issues . . . Yes, I’m coming!” Her comrade was gesturing frantically from the gate. With a “I’ll look for you tonight,” Barbara bustled away.

  Curious. Inquisitive and/or peculiar. There was a lot of that going around.

  Jean, too, started for the gate, but had taken only two steps when her phone emitted its jaunty, even defiant, tune. Stopping dead, she found it right at the top of her bag, amazingly, and glanced at the screen. “Hey, Rebecca. How are y’all doing this morning?”

  “No nightmares last night, thank goodness. And you?”

  “I’m fine,” Jean lied. She heard little Linda babbling and Michael’s voice babbling back. What kind of accent was the baby developing? Would she be able to sort her biscuits from her cookies?

  “Are you watching Alasdair’s press conference?”

  “Stephanie Venegas’s press conference, you mean, with Alasdair allowed in the back door?” Jean slumped against the icy metal of Barbara’s car, glad he hadn’t heard that remark. She tried to retrieve it. “Well, he’s part of the team, he’s contributing information from P and S. And no, I’m not watching the show.”

  “It’s been short and sweet so far. Alasdair talked about the theft of the Witch Box, but the reporters were more interested in how he found Sharon’s body. And yes, he was with someone else at the time, but wild horses couldn’t drag the name from him—not that he said that in so many words, but you can tell from his expression.”

  “I can just see his expression,” Jean said, and she could, his face so tightly closed a chisel couldn’t pry it open.

  “Now Stephanie’s saying they’ve released their original suspect in Hagedorn’s murder and arrested Jessica Evesdottir.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Jean filled Rebecca in on the latest events, concluding, “I wonder what Barbara will say when she finds out Jessica’s been arrested. As for whether Jessica is guilty, I don’t—I just don’t feel that she is.”

  “Have you got any better candidates?”

  “Maybe Tim killed Sharon himself, to make it look as if those secret societies wanted to shut them up.” The choir, Jean saw, was gathering outside the door of the church, music books in hand. “By the way, there’s going to be a free concert in honor of Wesley Hagedorn at the Palace tonight at seven . . .” Her call-waiting signal beeped just as Linda set up a wail.

  “Feeding time,” Rebecca said. “Enjoy the concert—we’ve got a set of great-grandparents arriving tonight for a baby-showing, so we have to stick close to home.”

  “We’ll miss you!” Jean hit her keypad. “Hello?”

  “Good morning, Jean,” said Miranda. “How are you getting on?”

  “I’m checking out a lead at the church,” Jean answered, which was less a “how” than a “where,” but it gave her a chance to make her report. “You’re up early.”

  “I was after watching Alasdair’s press conference.”

  He’d be pleased at how both Rebecca and Miranda put him in the driver’s seat. “Yeah, I was just talking to Rebecca about that. Alasdair took the reporter’s bullets for me, I’m afraid, though mostly I’m grateful.”

  “Good man, Alasdair.”

  Yes, he was. And he would never have the poor taste to point that out to her.

  “Now Tim Dingwall’s staging a show outside the police station—I’m assuming he and his ilk were there making statements, and he’s taking advantage of the audience.”

  “Oh yeah. I’m sure Stephanie’s thrilled.” The processional hymn resounded from the church and the choir, singing of gold crowns, et al., processed inside. Okay, so she wasn’t going to attend the morning service.

  Rousing herself from her slump against Barbara’s car, Jean strolled around the corner onto Palace Green. Ahead of her rose the Palace itself, the tall main building embraced by two one-story outbuildings, called “dependencies”, in the symmetrical elegance of the time period. The tall cupola beckoned, the gold crown on the weathervane glinting.

  “Tim’s introduced his sister Kelly,” Miranda said. “She’s been promoted to chief sidekick, I’m thinking. And the red-haired lad behind, that’s never Dylan—one of the reporters just asked if he’s been found yet. Must be Quentin.”

  “Dylan’s still missing?”

  “Oh aye, that he is. Left town, I reckon. I doubt Jessica’s wishing she’d left town as well. You’re saying she and Wesley pinched a document from Blair?”

  “She hasn’t admitted to that. Yet. If she’s charged with Sharon’s murder, to say nothing of Wesley’s, she might decide pocketing an eighteenth-century memorandum is the least of her problems.”

  “Oh aye,” Miranda said, and continued her play-by-play. “Tim sounds to be a wee bit desperate. His face is all twisted round, like one of those television evangelists you lot have here. He’s got news for us. It’s essential we listen. Everything we believe about history and government is false, the proof’s in his wife’s murder, and we’ve been duped by the perfidious media, which, mind you, he’s using to great effect just now.”

  “He does see himself as an evangelist. Besides, push has come to shove financially. Now or never. Bacon or bust.” Jean allowed herself a look at the huge tree, at its branches heavy behind the orange and gold confetti of leaves. Would other ghost-allergic souls soon be picking up frissons from it? But it wasn’t the tree’s fault that some human had used it to—what? Scrape off an inconvenient colleague or relative like a barnacle?

  She started down the street toward the Palace, stretching her legs, inhaling the chill, smoke-flavored air. “Is that all?”

  “He’s saying the results of the core sample from the graveyard are ‘inconclusive’. Lowering expectations, eh? And that’s all, aye . . . No. Kelly’s pushing forward, going on about Lords of the Lie, and Tim looks to have swallowed a frog.”

  “He doesn’t yet have his keystone or capstone, Francis Bacon’s papers. And he thinks he needs the charm stone to find them. Maybe he’s planning to insert it into the slot on Robert Mason’s grave, and that will open up a secret stairway to the vault.” With a jump and a skip, she dodged a puddle on the pitted blacktop. “That’s it! That’s exactly what Tim expects to happen! He and Sharon were looking for a shortcut with their core sample, because they can’t find the stone.”
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br />   “That’s no more daft than their other fancies,” Miranda said with a laugh. “Ah, Tim and Kelly are handing out brochures and saying they’ll be conducting tours of the Historic Area the afternoon. Quentin’s pretending he’s never before seen the lot of them. Poor lad.”

  “Poor lad indeed. Eventually he’s going to have to admit to Alasdair that he helped Kelly steal the replica Witch Box.”

  Miranda clucked her tongue over that. “I’ve done my share of promotion over the years . . .”

  Jean grinned. “Really?”

  “And I’m guessing that Kelly’s moved too soon, flogging the film. It’s no good promoting the product if it’s not available, or available within the attention span of the average reporter—present company excepted.”

  “I’m a journalist, not a reporter.”

  “Aye, that you are. Kelly was chatting up folk on the airplane, you were saying?”

  “Hugh was saying, yes. I bet you’re right, she’s plunged on ahead, and Tim’s not ready. He thought they knew where the charm stone was, but they didn’t. He and Sharon were under a lot of pressure, and things start breaking under pressure. People start dying.” Jean reached the brick wall surrounding the Palace, and looked through the open gate on the left toward the cluster of small brick buildings that were the domestic offices—smokehouse, bathhouse, kitchen.

  Kitchen. Mary Napier had been a kitchen-worker. The Dinwiddie Kitchen had been moved from the Palace during renovations in 1751. Mary would have been ninety-one then, if she’d still been alive—and that wasn’t likely. But what about her son, Thomas? Maybe the ghost was his wife.

  “My breakfast’s just arrived,” said Miranda in Jean’s ear. “I’ll be saying cheery-bye.”

  “Have a good—oh! There’s going to be a concert at the Palace tonight, with Barbara Finch playing one of Wesley’s harpsichords. Can you join—us?” No reason Alasdair would turn down a concert.

  “Sorry to be missing out,” Miranda said, “but this is the evening I’m away to D.C. to join Duncan, for the embassy reception the night and the seminar on the Monday.”

  “That’s right. No surprise I’d forgotten. Safe journey, and I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “I’m expecting that, right enough. Cheery-bye.”

  Jean visualized Miranda and her silver-haired companion and lover—Duncan had the polish of Count Dracula without the appetite—holding forth to the British ambassador about dealing with crazed Americans, even though she knew darn well the seminar’s topic was marketing Britain to America.

  She switched off the phone, stowed it away, and started toward the kitchen, only to be caught up in a group being ushered into the Palace itself. Okay. No problem. It had been a long time since she’d been there, and now she had a different perspective.

  Instead of comparing contemporary tastes in fabric and wallpaper to those of the Dunmores, she compared the intricate arrangements of pistols, muskets, and swords in the entrance hall to those at Blair Castle and other British historical sites, displays intended to send a message to the peasantry. She eyed the secretary’s office, imagining Robert Mason doing the usual paperwork, all in the finest script. Hearing the secrets, writing the confidential letters, Tim had said.

  Although Mason was much more likely writing confidential letters about disgruntled colonists than about mythical charms and delusory witch hunts, he had manifestly been intrigued by the story of Charlotte, Lady Dunmore’s, charm stone.

  Perhaps the Witch Box had been stored in the pantry. Perhaps it had been stored in the governor’s dressing room, or sat next to Lady Dunmore’s dressing table in an upstairs reception room. Did it even then seem to squat like a toad? Or was its almost medieval appearance and reputation no more than a jarring note in the beautifully appointed—for the colonies—chamber, where tall windows, not arrow slits, looked out over Palace Green toward the church.

  Had Charlotte come to Virginia looking for the charm stone? If she’d found it, where was it now? Lying anonymously in a corner at Blair? Or maybe she hadn’t found it, because Mary Napier, realizing it was bringing her bad luck, not good, had chucked it into the nearest ditch or buried it in the woods.

  Jean strolled through the ballroom and the supper room and exited into the formal gardens, the tidy beds bright with seasonal flowers. A hard left took her back to the little courtyard and on into the kitchen.

  She stopped dead on the doorstep. A delectable scent filled the two rooms of the whitewashed cottage, a sweet, rich, smoky scent. The same nose- and mouth-filling scent she’d sensed in the Dinwiddie Kitchen, wafted through time if not through space.

  A copper pot filled with amber liquid simmered on the vast hearth. Besides it stood a bearded interpreter dressed in simple striped vest, white shirt, and breeches, talking to a group of visitors. “. . . small beer was the everyday beverage in Virginia. People knew plain water would make them sick but they didn’t know why—it was polluted by sewage from the town. We know today that boiling the water is what made the beer safe. You soak barley or wheat bran, then boil the liquid with hops and sometimes molasses, then add yeast. Sometimes the brewers would add a cock, a rooster, to the beer, but we’re not doing that.”

  The visitors giggled, if a bit uncomfortably. Jean thought, That’s not a recipe, that’s magic.

  Stepping forward to a table filled with attractively presented dishes of food, he went on, “The kitchen staff would work all morning cooking the governor’s dinner. Roast pigeon and other meats, fried ox-tongue, ragout of cucumbers, mince pies. Vegetables, seafood. Jellies, syllabubs, cakes and cookies. We don’t know nearly as much about the food of people further down the social scale. The governors would bring their own cooks from Europe, but the kitchen staff, like the other Palace staff, tended to stay through different administrations.”

  Like Robert Mason, Jean thought. She asked, “Did Mary Napier ever work here?”

  “The witch?” asked another visitor.

  The interpreter blinked behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Why yes, to both questions. Mary worked in the earlier kitchen, before Governor Dinwiddie’s renovations in 1751-52. That building was moved and is now a guest house.”

  I know, Jean said silently. “And what about Mary’s son?”

  “Son?”

  “There’s a gravestone marked ‘Thomas Napier’.”

  The interpreter crossed his arms and hooked a hip on the side of the table. “That would be Thomasina, not Thomas. She was—he was—well, the child was a hermaphrodite.”

  The other visitors leaned forward, leading with their eyebrows. Jean’s bag slipped down her shoulder and almost landed on a stuffed cabbage, but she caught it in time.

  “The poor child was seen as God’s visitation on Mary. Thomasina tried dressing as a man and doing male work, but was forced into women’s clothing and women’s work. Not that cooking was necessarily women’s work—everyone had to know how to cook, it was a matter of survival.”

  If Jessica were here, Jean thought, she’d make a statement about social identity as a function of gender. Jean herself was chalking up another—well, not curse. Bad things happened. Like noting synchronicity in names, the human mind noted synchronicity in events.

  “Thomasina worked with Mary, and then after Mary’s death worked on here. Dinwiddie took pity on her and let her live in the old kitchen after it was moved. She baked bread and brewed beer, well into old age—no social security then. She was found dead not far from her cottage.”

  In the ravine that crosses Francis Street, Jean concluded. And children would throw stones and tease the poor old—person—who threatened assumptions about men and women’s roles.

  “There’s a book just out that tells the story. Witches and Wenches in Colonial Virginia. It must be selling well, there were some folks asking about Mary and Thomasina just a couple of days ago, what sort of valuables they might have had, that sort of thing.”

  “A big guy,” Jean asked, “like a roast pig without the apple in its m
outh, and a tiny woman?”

  “Yes. Friends of yours?”

  He obviously had not been watching television this morning. Jean was saved from another lie by her phone ringing. “Thank you,” she told the interpreter, and retired to the doorway, her hand in her bag. The phone registered another anonymous caller. “Hello?”

  “Jean, it’s Matt.”

  Behind her back, one of the visitors asked, “Is all this food made out of wax?”

  “Hi, Matt,” said Jean. “How’d you get this number?”

  “I saw Alasdair at the press conference and thought you must be with him, so called the police station. They put him on the phone and he gave me your number. Sounded like he was in a hurry.”

  Jean could hear Alasdair’s voice, courtesy as brisk and cold as a blizzard. Thanks, Matt.

  “No,” the interpreter was saying, “the food is real, but for demonstration purposes only. The mouse that was eating the cookies we didn’t refrigerate last night was flouting health-department rules. I’m going to have to borrow an eighteenth-century mousetrap from one of our archaeologists.”

  “I’m doing some work at the office,” Matt was saying. “You said you’d like to visit.”

  Jean faded out of the kitchen into the courtyard, quelling any impulse to keep right on fading over the hills and far away. Her curiosity would just turn her around and send her back again.

  Curiosity. Thomasina had been a curiosity.

  “Sure,” Jean told Matt. “I’d love to drop in for a visit. Where are you exactly?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Jean walked as fast as she could without breaking into a trot, following the cadence in her own mind, the drone that was Alasdair’s presence beneath the complex melody of her thoughts processing, evaluating, compiling.

  The church was silent—perhaps the congregation was hearing a sermon about love and forgiveness. Just beyond it stood the one nineteenth-century house on Duke of Gloucester. Not thinking of sore thumbs—the structure was interesting in its own right—Jean passed it by as well as various modest clapboard buildings and gardens not yet withered for the fall. At Merchant’s Square, she darted into the Barnes & Noble that was also the college bookstore.