Picking the Ballad's Bones (10 page)

Shoot, they hadn't even gotten to see
Edinburgh Castle where they kept the crown jewels of Scotland Sir
Walter had rescued from their basement hiding place, nor Mons Meg
the cannon that he had also brought out of obscurity. This place
actually didn't look much different from other farmland she'd seen
except there were more stone houses than any place she'd ever been
except maybe New Braunfels, Texas, and most of the houses there
weren't so big. In Missouri there were lots of stone fences just
like here. They didn't have anything else to do with the rocks they
dug up from the pasture. But this place was so crammed with history
that it seemed like something important had happened three layers
down on every scrap of dirt. It boggled the mind.

If she was going to see that fancy
house, she decided, she had better get her postcards and go. But
beside the coffee mugs that said Abbotsford, Home of Sir Walter
Scott in tasteful rust against cream with a little drawing in
rust-colored paint, there was a rack of books, paperbacks of the
Waverly novels, which she had read a long time ago, and something
called The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Seeing the word "minstrel,"
she snagged it and paid for it and rushed out to show the others
the ballad book she had found.

Out in the open air she cracked it
open to peek at it, as if afraid the songs would leak out, and saw
to her disappointment that it was not a collection of ballads but
one long poem by Sir Walter Scott. Oh, well. It would give her
something to read during future traipsings around.

She took a step toward the main
entrance door and then remembered that the old dragon in the hall
wasn't any more likely to let her in with the banjo than she would
Willie. Gussie didn't figure once Willie got to looking around in
that fascinating old place he'd remember to stop anytime soon to
come out and take charge of the banjo.

She sighed and started to find herself
a bench in the garden to sit down and look at her book, and noticed
that one of the other doors was a little ajar. That wouldn't be
very honest, now would it, sneaking in like that?

She thumbed through the first part of
her book but a breeze came up, whipping up the rose petals shed by
the bushes nearby, and riffling the pages forward. When she
returned to the book, she found herself staring at a passage that
said, "Now slow and faint, he led the way/ Where, cloistered round,
the garden lay/The pillared arches were over their head/And beneath
their feet were the bones of the dead." My, my, she couldn't have
put it better herself, she thought, shivering in the breeze and
resisting the temptation to lift her feet up lest she be walking on
anybody's grave. The open door creaked and waggled back and forth
as if beckoning her. The banjo nudged her with "Onward, Christian
Soldiers."

Well, what the hell, she had paid her
money, hadn't she? And she would be careful not to bump the banjo
against any of the fine furnishings. Like Willie said, it wasn't
only to avoid hurting Sir Walter's treasures, but because if she
wrecked the banjo they'd all be up the creek without a
paddle.

* * *

The ghost held the door open until the
older lady with the banjo had entered then bowed her in with a
playful flourish. Guests! He was entertaining again. Not the crude
gawkers who came daily to his hall but people who felt like old
friends—almost as if they could have been his characters, many of
whom he freely admitted had been based on friends.

The golden-haired lass was clearly a
tragic heroine if ever he had seen one, more than a little fey and
quite charming. The man was roguish and venturesome and reminded
him in bearing and attitude of his old friend James Hogg. But it
was with the older woman, the one carrying the banjo, that he felt
a most peculiar affinity. He had always done a good job portraying
her type. He didn't do very well with women by and large, according
to his critics, except for his peasant women, the mothers, the
witches, the midwives and widows. This woman was of that sort—he
fancied her a slightly aged version of Jeannie Deans, his heroine
in The Heart of MidLothian, who had walked in a day and a night to
London to save her sister's life. But, he saw with approval, this
was no mere ignorant peasant crone but an educated woman. She
carried one of his books in her hand—one of his first, by gar!
Perhaps she would like him to sign it?

He could feel the emotions of these
people and to some degree read their thoughts, as he had not wished
to do with the tourists. He had known at once that these were the
people whose journey had caught his attention across time and
space—the instrument the woman carried had harped him from the
dead. He liked the look of them. They seemed to him worthy wights.
Noble ladies and gentlemen, if a bit on the scruffy side, on a
noble quest. He wasn't sure exactly what it was—they were tired and
their thoughts and feelings were not particularly congruous—but he
felt certain their cause was a good one.

As he held up his hand to bow Gussie
in he fretted to see how the light pierced clean through his
fingers, even on this drizzly chilly day when the wind worried the
petals from his roses and rhododendrons into a mosaic of pink,
violet, and white that the gardeners for the Trust would all too
soon tidy away.

In his lifetime there had been a great
deal of gruesome fascination with the subject of how contact could
be made with the dead, but he couldn't recall that anyone had ever
addressed the problem that perplexed him now, which was how to
directly contact the living.

* * *

Julianne Martin was wondering about
making contact too. The longer her deafness continued, the more it
became disorienting instead of merely inconvenient. Of course, the
others remembered to look at her and make themselves clear when
they were speaking directly to her. But it dawned on her now how
much conversation is not face-to-face but casual, remarks thrown
over the shoulder, overheard conversations between two other people
not meant to exclude her specifically but simply not remembering
that she could no longer choose whether to enter into the exchange
or not. The absence of sound, which had always been her most
important sense, made her feel as if she had become a ghost
herself—or as if others had become ghosts, or television images
with the volume turned off.

She felt half ashamed and half angry
at the irritation she had seen in Willie's face when she thanked
him for helping her with the Gypsy. She really had been betrayed by
Torchy, whether intentionally or not. Maybe those people were great
friends of Torchy's and she got along fine with them, but they were
rougher than Julianne was used to, even when her hearing had been
intact. Surely that was easy enough for Willie to understand. It
couldn't be that hard for him to put himself in her
place.

She had always been able to handle all
but the most drunken and belligerent advances by herself, sometimes
even making the guy see her as a person, even a friend, but Torchy
must be a little twisted, judging from the company she kept,
because that business with the Gypsies had been a whole other kind
of scene. Juli had felt so panicky—so suddenly aware of all the
nuances, all the signals she was missing that meant the difference
between defusing the situation and escalating it to
violence.

Under normal
circumstances, if she had to, if she should remain deaf . . . (No,
she wasn't going to think about that. She wasn't going to put that
energy out there and manifest that reality.) But
if
she had to, she would
eventually learn to do something else and become one of those
differently abled people who become so remarkable that they have
miniseries made about them. If she lived through this or didn't get
abducted and sold to white slavers or spend the rest of her life in
prison or something. After all, if she had a friend who was going
through this, she'd tell them that they were expecting a little too
much of themselves to think they could run away from the law and
contend with lecherous lion-handlers and save folk music for
posterity while they were like, in their adaptation phase. Oh,
well. This was probably just another one of those profound
experiences Lucien talked about where the universe was trying to
teach you something. She just hoped it wasn't teaching her that in
loosening her hold on what mattered most to her it was preparing
her to leave this plane of existence.

Perish the thought, my
dear!
a reassuring little voice echoed
inside of her in the way that her late husband George's always did.
That gave her courage. She missed George and wished his spirit had
been able to hitch a ride with Sam's in the banjo. She had heard
those superstitions about ghosts not being able to cross flowing
water and supposed it might apply to the ocean too. Probably the
banjo making a corporeal body for the spirit to inhabit had enabled
Sam's successful crossing. Whatever. The little voice encouraged
her and she skipped forward, and passed Willie as he paused to
pantomime looking thoughtfully at the book-lined walls of Sir
Walter Scott's study.

The plush seat of the wingback chair
at the writing desk made from the wood of ships from the Spanish
Armada sank with a sigh.

* * *

The Debauchery Devil felt picked on.
Really, the way the other devils delighted in spoiling her fun,
you'd have thought Torchy was a mortal instead of one of them. They
resented her glamorous past and all the perks of her particular
specialty, she'd always known they did. But that was no reason to
go spoiling a whole long car trip. She had planned some really
special stuff for the Randolphs, the big mocha man, and the
half-breed bitch. But with Julianne loose and spreading
goodness-only-knew-what stories, Willie MacKai alive and
un-lionized, and the banjo still functioning, little Torchy Burns
really needed the lot in the van to assist in raising her
credibility level.

"So, Torchy, just where did you take
Willie anyhow?" Anna Mae asked.

"Oh, I can hardly bear to speak of it,
ducky," Torchy said, pretending to be faint. "It was too awful. I
was just going to take him back to see these new cars that were
hooked on to the train? They belonged to some friends of mine who
run a circus. Well, halfway through the next car back of ours who
should I see but the coppers waiting to arrest us? So naturally, I
pushed Willie ahead of me into the next car. It was dark and while
we were feeling around, trying to find a way into the next car
where I was sure my friends would be waiting, I'm afraid he sort of
accidentally blundered into the lions' cage." She bit at her
thumbnail and twined a curl of her red hair around one red-nailed
finger, trying to look contrite and embarrassed. "Well, then of
course I went for help and who should I meet but the little blond
gel, Juli. She was lying low too, you see, having gotten separated
from you, dearie," she said to Anna Mae. "So I popped in with her
where my friends were and asked them to help me get Willie away
from the lions.

"That particular band of Gypsies have
always been such charming people, so—colorful, you know. One can't
believe all the stories one hears, now can one? But there have been
some changes in their politics lately and my old chums aren't in
charge anymore. Fellow who was running things was an ugly young
stud who informed me quite rudely that they were most particular
what they fed their lions and asked me not to interfere. He sent
some fellow to go tend to Willie and the lions and dismissed me
rudely, saying they'd take care of Juli. Well, naturally I was
quite suspicious and I came looking for help, which was when I saw
darling Brose being abducted by the bobbies."

"Gussie went after Willie," Anna Mae
said.

"Oh, yes, I knew that," Torchy said
smoothly, "and I saw that she had him away from the lions so I
thought I should try to help darling Brose by using my influence
and here we are!" She finished brightly, then looked pouty. "I do
so hope you'll convince Willie and Juli and Gussie that I was only
trying to help in my small way."

Privately, she thought, You'd damn
well better convince them since I'm going to all the trouble to
restrain myself from making this road turn into a tunnel that bores
straight into the heart of a sacred fairy knowe and watching your
silly faces as the end of the road closes off and the road goes
down and down and ever down so that you're lost in the world of my
ken and kin.

"We know you didn't mean no harm,
honey," Brose said, patting her on the shoulder gingerly. He didn't
sound awfully convinced; in fact, he sounded quite wary of her
actually, but it would have to do. Maybe later, when she had the
protection of the ashes of the written ballads, she could toy with
them all a bit. Nothing as prosaic as another car crash. Some nice
terminal sexually transmitted diseases for the younger ones and
perhaps Brose the good shepherd could be devoured by a wolf if one
was handy. Enough time for that later. She could call out the
Hounds of Hell, the Hound of the Baskervilles, or Huckleberry Hound
for that matter, whenever she liked, it was all just a matter of
the proper timing.

She had found out at devil central
that Willie and the others were at Abbotsford so she decided to
fool her traveling companions by doing the unexpected and being
genuinely helpful, much as it pained her, and so, faithful as a
triple-A road map, she gave them the very best directions for the
very fastest, straightest roads and short cuts that truly would
lead to the estate and not into some bog or hidden tarn on a
deserted moor.