Haunt Me Still (31 page)

THE FOLLO WING DAY
, the remains of a body, blackened beyond recognition, were pulled from the smoking ruins of the castle. It proved to be Ian Blackburn. Though a police forensic team searched the ruins with a fine sieve, no trace of Carrie Douglas was ever found.

Their followers at Castle Bruiach were charged with the Scottish version of accessory murder in the death of Lucas Porter. A lot about Auld Callie’s, Sybilla’s, and Eircheard’s deaths, however, would never be explained, because everyone who knew the details was either missing or dead.

At the hospital, they told me I’d recently had a pretty serious concussion. It explained my amnesia on the hilltop, along with the headache and sluggishness I’d wakened with. But not, I fretted, what I’d done. Or hadn’t.

It was Lucas’s flash drive, in the end, that did that. He’d documented, in cold detail, three murders. On a sullen gray afternoon at police headquarters in Perth, DI Sheena McGregor summoned Lady Nairn, Ben, and me to view the film if we wished. “Wish” seemed a very odd choice of words; I would not wish that sight on anyone. But I needed to see with my waking eyes what I had done, or not done. So I sat with my hands tightly clasped in my lap, watching myself dip in and out of consciousness in the background as Carrie held Sybilla down and Ian raised the ritual blade. The cry from Sybilla as it struck was hair-raising even on a small screen. At the moment of its happening, it had roused me from my stupor. I’d stumbled to Sybilla’s side as if drunk, trying to stop the blood, to pour it back into her body with my hands. As Carrie laughed, Ian had backhanded me so that I spun away, sliding once more to the ground, unconscious.

That was all I needed to see. I walked out of the room before the camera pulled away from me. I could not bear to see Ben either looking at me, his face a careful blank, or looking studiously away. And I had no wish to watch Eircheard die.

There are some things that, once known, cannot be un-known. Cannot be forgotten or erased.

I walked out of the building to find Lily sitting on a bench outside the door. She looked pale and very young, her face pinched with grief inside the bright halo of her hair.

“It’s my fault,” she said, swallowing back tears. “It’s all my fault.”

I sat down beside her. “You’re not responsible for what Carrie and Ian did, Lily.”

“I thought he was brilliant. I thought he was cool. I thought he
liked
me. I’m an
idiot,
” she wailed.

“He used you, sweetheart. So did Carrie.”

“I went along with him,” she said, her voice ragged with self-loathing. “I lied to you: It
was
me on the hill, that first day you were at Dunsinnan. I thought we were rehearsing a secret initiation rite. And I was with Ian the next morning, after they killed Auld Callie. I didn’t know, but I should have. And then I went with him, after the fire festival. I thought it was a lark. And they almost killed you. And Eircheard—Eircheard is dead.” She bit her lip, looking away as her voice dropped to a whisper. “I miss him.”

“So do I.”

“I’m sorry.” Her face crumpled and sobs racked her. I put my arm around her and let her cry. She’d been naïve, not evil, but she would have a hard time forgiving herself. It was one of the worst sins of evil, I reflected. Twisting naïveté and innocence to its own use.

Holding Lily, I sat lost in my own thoughts. That she’d been on the hill explained part of what I’d seen, but not everything; the image of her neck thickly smeared with blood was still vivid in my mind. Surely what I’d seen had been half dream, twining around reality, twisting its shape.

It took time to sort out everything we’d found, and some things that we’d lost.

The manuscript we’d found at fonthill had vanished in the flames at Loch Bruiach. What little I’d heard about it came from Carrie and Lucas. Tantalizing as their hints had been, I could not trust a word of it—even, at times, the basic identification of a letter by John Dee, presumably to Shakespeare, and a manuscript of
Macbeth
. No one else would likely want to trust even the fact of the finding. I knew the sort of media storm that Shakespeare manuscripts stirred up. It was easier to wonder about what I’d nearly seen—and rue its passing—in quiet and let others blather publicly about just what Catherine forrest may have found.

The mirror proved to be Dee’s and went back to the British Museum—its exact fit into the groove in the floor of Castle Bruiach was noted, though no one knew quite what to do with that information. Marks on the side were consistent with the lettering identified by Arthur Dee—but they were also consistent, noted the lab, with random lettering.

It went on rotating display, half the year in the Enlightenment Gallery, half the year in the Mexican room, attached to a statue of Tezcatlipoca at the foot. Museum staff noted that every once in a while, in either place, someone would be found in front of it, shaking in terror, claiming to have seen visions of blood and fire. The guards avoided looking at it.

Lady Nairn’s mirror was found in a ritual room deep inside the maze at Joanna Black Books, surrounded by black and purple candles, half burned away. Nearby lay a knife with traces of Auld Callie’s blood. The only prints on the handle were Joanna’s. Or Carrie’s, I should say.

The loch, which had so easily cast me back out, kept close and secret hold of the knife from the hill, which remains unrecovered.

The owner of Her Majesty’s Theatre was discreetly informed of the cache of magical books in the dome room; what he did with most of them remained still more discreet. Dee’s book with Arthur’s letter inside, however, he donated to the British Library, where scholars began to squawk over just what the phrase “one of my father’s scholars” implied. No one was as certain as Joanna had been that the diagrams had anything to do with the Globe.

Aubrey’s diary went to join the bulk of his papers at Oxford university’s Bodleian Library, on permanent loan from Lady Nairn.

Plans for a private production of
Macbeth
using objects from her collection were scrapped. Instead, Lady Nairn opted for the first public exhibition of the Nairn collection, to open at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh, later traveling down to the British Museum. As part of it, she decided to include screenings of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s lost film of
Macbeth.

She still wanted a production of the play to run in tandem with the exhibition, but thankfully she did not ask me to direct it. Instead, she asked me to direct as its counterpart, light balancing darkness, the comedy that told another story of witchcraft:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
To that, I happily said yes.

Both Carrie and Ian died intestate; under Scottish law, this made Lady Nairn the sole heir of them both, as aunt and “sibling of a grandparent,” respectively. So Lady Nairn found herself in possession of a Covent Garden bookshop and a fine collection of rare occult esoterica, including a black, staring cat named Lilith and an unimpressed snake named Medea, as well as the royalties of Corra ravensbrook’s book, which became an instant bestseller when news of the murders broke.

Jason Pierce surfaced in Australia. Two hours before the Samhuinn fire festival was to start, he’d received a call from someone purporting to be with the festival organizers, offering him an out via his understudy. Jason had never once rehearsed the role of the Winter King and had had enough of Scottish gloom. He’d been so relieved that he’d jumped into his car and headed straight for London and then the surfing beaches of home.

Jamie Clifton turned up alive at fonthill. After hearing shots, she had pulled herself, terrified and quaking, into an adjoining room, huddling beneath a desk. At her suggestion, the College of Mount Saint Vincent, which had no archival library, loaned the letter from Catherine to Edwin forrest to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where it could be properly housed and studied. Jamie began a biography of Catherine Sinclair.

Eircheard had been mentoring a young man in Perth, trying to keep him out of the sort of trouble that had landed Eircheard in prison. The fires of the forge had barely gone cold when Lady Nairn offered the youth the use of the smithy; he had moved in the next day. He had a long way to go before he could touch Eircheard’s mastery in the making of swords, but he had nothing but time on his hands. That, and determination, and a chance to do something with his life. To become a maker, as Eircheard might have said. Eircheard, said Lady Nairn, would have found that legacy enough.

The morning of Auld Callie’s death, Effie Summers had been found on her knees in Dunkeld Cathedral. Thereafter, she’d endured several days of police attention as a prime suspect in that murder. She attributed the revelation of her innocence to divine intervention. Much to Effie’s surprise, Lady Nairn agreed. “Of course,” Lady Nairn told me brightly over the phone, “our opinions as to the identity of the deity doing the intervening differ markedly. But it did not occur to Effie to ask.” When the cathedral’s regular minister returned to work, the reverend Mr. Gosson took his fire and brimstone to another post, and Effie followed him.

Sheena McGregor was promoted to detective chief inspector. Lily went back to school.

In the spring, Lily called to invite me back to Dunsinnan, her voice both shy and excited. She was to be initiated into her grandmother’s coven on Beltane: May Day. The other great festival of the Celtic year, the celebration of life and light, as Samhuinn was the celebration of death and darkness. Lily wanted me to present her to the coven.

“It’s unusual for an outsider to do the presenting,” said Lady Nairn after Lily had ceded her the phone and danced away. “But it’s not entirely unheard of. It does complicate things a wee bit, though. There are parts of the rite, you understand, that you may not witness. I must ask you to honor that rule.”

I laughed. “I won’t hide in a bush and watch.”

“There are no bushes,” said Lady Nairn. “It will be on the hilltop.”

I took a deep breath. If it had been anyone other than Lily, I would have said no in an instant. I was not ready to go back. As it was, it took all my willpower to hold my voice steady. “I won’t go up the hill alone, then.”

“Good girl. Though in this case, it’ll be more a question of heading down it, on cue.” Lady Nairn sighed. “I would have waited, you know. It’s customary to require initiates to be at least eighteen. But she has seen the darkest side of the craft, and I’ve judged it more important to balance that darkness with a vision of the light than to hold to arbitrary considerations of age.”

Balance.
It was something I managed, in a fragile way, most days. But I still had to fight for it more nights than I cared to admit, when the smell of blood rose thickly around me.

“How’s Ben?”

The question startled me. “We aren’t in touch.”
There are some things that, once seen, cannot be forgotten. Once known, cannot be un-known.
He would never be able to look at me without seeing Sybilla’s blood on my hands.

“Never is a very long time,” said Lady Nairn, as if I’d spoken aloud. “It will become bearable, in time. If you let it.”

I’d said something similar once, to Lily. “How do you know?” I asked, my voice ragged in my throat.

“I’ve seen it,” she said simply.

So, on a blustery day at the end of April, I took the train north once more, this time all the way to Perth, where Lady Nairn and Lily picked me up at the station and drove me back to Dunsinnan House.

On a table just inside the door, the silver cauldron was filled with yellow daffodils and bright purple thistles. Up on the bed in the room of pale blue silk and dragons, a dress the color of peacocks was laid out on my bed. Beside it lay a folder. “Open it,” said Lily.

Inside was a single scorched page. It seemed to be a letter from a woman writing to an unborn daughter, telling a tale about a death that was not intended and a boy who was not a boy.

“Hal Berridge?” I asked, looking up sharply at Lady Nairn.

“So it would seem.”

The writer went on to claim for the yet-to-be-born girl heritage from Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, and the English wizard John Dee.

“What will you do with this?” I asked. “Keep it,” she said. “Keep it quiet. But we thought you had earned the right to know.”

She and Lily soon excused themselves. Lily, however, hung back at the door, her fingers twisting on the doorknob. “
Look like the innocent flower,
” she said bleakly, “
but be the serpent under it.
I’ve been the serpent more than the lily.”

“Not necessarily a bad thing; the snake is an old symbol of wisdom, you know. Female wisdom.”

“That’s what Gran says.” She smiled wanly. “from a time when the Goddess ruled in harmony with the god, before men set him above her, crushing her serpent beneath his feet. But I’ve been anything but wise…. I’m sorry, Kate. Though I don’t think I can ever say it properly. Or enough.”

“It’s not what you say that will make it have meaning. It’s what you do. How you live your life.”

She took a deep breath and straightened. “right, then. I suppose I had better go and get on with it. Thank you. Again.” With the brief flash of a grin, she disappeared.

A maid brought dinner to my room on a tray, but I wasn’t hungry. I stood at the window for a long time, watching the setting sun light the hill to gold, which deepened to pink and purple shadows, draining to gray as the sky fired to liquid sapphire and finally went black. At last I stirred and began to dress. This far north, dawn would come so early that it was pointless to go to bed. I was to leave early in the morning, directly after the ceremony, to make it back for a rehearsal in London in the afternoon. I could sleep on the train.

At three o’clock in the morning, Lily tapped on my door. She wore a dress of white with a long pointed bodice and tight sleeves that Guinevere would have envied. On her head was a wreath of creamy rowan blossoms that frothed with a heady sweet scent as she moved. In her dress, she might have walked out of a painting or poem by Rossetti, or Millais, or Burne-Jones. But the red hair curling loosely around her was that of Botticelli’s Aphrodite.