Picking the Ballad's Bones (32 page)

"As for Torchy, she was
having the devil's own time figuring out what to do after she'd
failed to stop Julianne. I wonder, you know, if she was trying all
that hard at that. She didn't like what the other devils had said
to her about making everything and everybody pure for a while. She
didn't like being counted out of the action. So maybe she just
screwed up for spite. Or maybe she was drunk or high at the time.
But she left Giorgio to his fate, condemned to die, hanged from the
miller's dam for finishing off poor Isabelle, and he, if you'll
remember rightly, didn't have a string ring to pull himself out
again before he died.

"But now that the banjo
was in the ghost realm, it was callin' its own to join
it."

* * *

"So, ye claim to be my
great-grandson," Bold Buccleuch said to Wat when the banjo had
finished its song. "I've a good mind to have ye prove yoursel' at
arms but I ken yer a lammiter."

"A what?" Gussie asked Wat.

"My limp," he said. "I had a lame leg
from boyhood. Now that my presence is stronger than yours, I
suppose you seem to have it too. Just as well. I'd never best the
Bold Buccleuch in battle," he said fondly. "A proper terror he
was."

"I'm touched," the Widow Hetherton
said to his lordship. "Ye'll no pick on a lammiter man though ye'll
mak' one of my poor guest Toppet, and despoil a helpless widow
woman. Fie!"

"Woman, ye'll no rebuke me under my
ain roof!"

Footsteps stumped into the
hall then, and a man in
somewhat tattered
battle dress clomped to the fireplace and speared a piece of meat
from the spit.

"God's blood, 'tis Christie's Jock!
Laddie, I thought we'd left ye for dead in Northumberland gin I
received yer ransom letter."

"And dead I'd be in Northumberland i'
truth gin I'd waited for you to ransom me, Buccleuch. I maun use my
natural gifts instead. The provost had a bonny daughter, The Flower
of Northumberland they ca'ed her. I offered t' marry her and mak'
her my lady."

"Ah, and what would your Mary have to
say aboot that?"

"I shudder to think on't. But this
lassie served to gie me a horse and siller tae cross the border
with and then I tuke the siller and hired her a horse and sent her
home again greetin'."

"Ah, Jock, ye should nae brak her
tender hairt sae sair, mon. If ye'd fetched her here, I'd hae
comforted her soon enough."

"That I know, Buccleuch, but I've mony
years tae go before I'm sae hard as ye that I would turn o'er tae
yer tender maircies a lassie who stole from her parents for love of
me. She's nae yet sixteen."

Buccleuch smacked his lips but then
frowned. "See that that too tender hairt o' yers gets nae in the
way o' business, Jock."

The
Widow Hetherton burst into tears. "Undone! I'm a' undone by
such ruffians as these!"

"My laird, can't you relent and let
this woman have back her goods?" Sir Walter asked. "You're a man of
business, I know, but also a great-hearted man, humorous and wise,
and you only steal from necessity—"

"Says who?" Buccleuch
demanded.

"Well—er—I did. In my bukes. I'd heard
about you as a lad, you see, and read the ballads of your exploits
and so I wrote bukes about you and these others."

"Did
ye noo? And did anybody read these bukes?"

Now Sir Walter was on
territory where he was sure of himself. "Probably most of the
literate world, I'd say, if sales figures are any indication. In my
day you becam' a
great hero in Scotland,
even in England and America, not to mention Germany, Italy, France,
Spain, and the other countries where my bukes were translated." He
hesitated a moment, then said in a dramatic voice, "Ye ken,
Great-Grandsire, that we cam' frae a time two hundred years frae
noo, when ye've lang been deid."

"Weel, ah
kenned
tha' mooch. I'm
nae sae auld as tae barely ha' grown sons, nae mair grandsons, nae
mair great-grandsons nae mair great wights o' yer advanced years,
though the resemblance is undeniable—yer the image o' my ane lost
Wat. And then, wha' wi' yer unco garmints and yer misshapen harp,
and tha' shadowish lass a'ways joost behind ye, 'tis clear yer nae
mortal wight. But if I've nae fear of the ghosts of my slain
enemies, and I have nane, then why maun I fear the speerit of my
descendant? Now, tell me mair aboot mesel' in these bukes o' yers .
. ."

"The King himself has read them," Sir
Walter said.

The Widow Hetherton crept forward a
pace and Gussie saw a blade in her left hand, held low in the fold
of her skirt. The hand also wore a wire metal ring on its middle
finger, and the fabric of the skirt caught on it as she brought the
blade up. Gussie, with a dancer's balance strengthened by a few
years of aikido when she was tending bar, reached out with a foot
and knocked the Widow sideways so that she dropped the blade in the
nasty rushes littering the floor. It vanished without a clatter or
a shimmer of light on the blade and the Widow Hetherton spat at
her.

A girl Gussie hadn't noticed before
stepped forward and helped the woman to her feet.

"Now, Jeannie Gordon, ye shouldnae be
soilin' yerself with the likes o' her, henny," Buccleuch
called.

"My Jeannie's but thinkin' o' yer
reputation, Buccleuch," a young man who Gussie noticed was
handsomer and not so rough-looking as the rest offered.

"Glenlogie, yer besotted
with women noo that ye've the floo'er o' the Gordons tae wife. Tell
me more about what ye wrote of me, Great-Grandson."

Gussie noticed as Jeannie
moved away from the Widow Hetherton that Jeannie too wore the ring
and a new intelligence peered from the Widow Hetherton's eyes as
she noticed it. So, at least two of Gussie's friends were here, in
the personas of the Widow, living out her ballad, and Jeannie,
apparently somewhat after she had almost died for the love of
Glenlogie.

And though Wat may have written about
Buccleuch and his men in books, there was no ballad in which
Buccleuch himself was the principal hero and for very good reason,
as she now saw. But Jock was self-admittedly the betrayer of the
Fair Flower of Northumberland. She'd have to see his hand. He and
Glenlogie were having a chat aside that made her think that she
might be right, especially when the banjo broke into first "The
Fair Flower of Northumberland" and then "Glenlogie" as if providing
theme music for the men. The renegade harper began to sing, with
Glenlogie and Jeannie providing harmony, and Jock adding a
baritone.

Wat continued to regale Buccleuch with
all of the latter's noble (and totally literary) deeds, and
Buccleuch was growing more and more thoughtful until he said to the
Widow, "Madame, 'tis in my rough-humored though good-natured and
totally noble way that I've been havin' sport wi' ye. The truth is
that I caught the villains who robbed ye before e'er ye cam' here
tae me, and my great-grandson here was right tae bring ye. Let it
never be said that a widow lady applies to the Keeper of Liddesdale
for justice and goes hame disappointed."

"Then you'll give her back her stock?"
Gussie blurted from within the apparition of Sir Walter.

"Aye, providin' my great-grandsire
here agrees tae pay me fee for every buke he sells wi' mah nam' in
it. A man's reputation is a thing tae bank wi'."

"I'd do sae gladly, for the sake of my
honor and yours and this lady's livelihood," Wat said with genuine
sadness. "But my ain lands have recently been
despoiled."

"What? Are the English dogs still at
it in your time? And after a' ye wrote aboot me?"

"No, Great-Grandsire, this was fell
magic. Not English, nor even Scots."

"Wha'? Outlanders? Despoilin' my
descendants?"

"Aye, and burnin' the
bukes."

"The bukes aboot mesel'?"

"Amang others. These same folk were
chasing us when we met wi' the Widow Hetherton's trod."

"Do ye ken where they might be
found?"

Wat consulted Gussie, who told him,
"I've a pretty good idea they'll have gone after Faron and Ellie.
We can try back at Carrs'."

"Aye," Wat said, and relayed the
information to Buccleuch.

Buccleuch slammed his fist onto the
table and scared three field mice into flight. "Then wha' dew we
dew sittin' aboot! We ride!"

Gussie blurted out again, "But you've
been dead three hundred years or better before these people were
born."

Jeannie Gordon spoke up in the
unmistakable tones of Willie MacKai, "Then we'll haunt the living
shit out of the sorry sons of bitches!"

CHAPTER 27

Though Giorgio had been the worst of
his tribe, he was by no means the only rotten apple in the barrel,
and his henchmen kept Faron and Ellie captive while they looted
Janet Carr's estate in their search for the banjo. Giorgio's wife
and uncle remained aloof, indifferent to the search, the uncle
playing on his violin, lost in the world of the music, and the
wife, as if in a trance, held the phone, through which the banjo
kept playing.

This was the stage in the movies or in
books, Ellie thought, where the good guys tried to talk the bad
guys out of their evil deeds or at least get a long drawn-out
explanation from them of why they were perpetrating their crimes.
Meanwhile, of course, the good guys were either taping the
explanation as a confession or there was a handy police official in
the wings, who was listening and taking it all down in
shorthand.

Ellie didn't expect rescue. She did
ask Giorgio's wife what had become of Gussie, but the woman just
shrugged and flipped a cigar butt at her.

"Don't you know those
things are bad for you?" Faron asked, but the woman was again
engrossed in the music coming from the telephone and from her
uncle's hands. Ellie thought that she looked like a woman who was
using the music to have a long, hard talk with herself. She was
still young and she looked plenty tough, but her nose had been
broken and her eyebrows and upper lip
were
split in more than one place. Two of her teeth were patched with
gold.

The banjo began a song
Ellie didn't remember and Faron only knew slightly. "'The Flowers
of the Forest,'" he said. "Sort of an elegy for the men lost at
Flodden, especially those from the Ettrick Forest. I didn't
recognize it at first because it's being played in march
time."

Uncle Theo manfully filled in with all
sorts of violin ornamentation, though it was plain that he was a
fine violinist of the concert type and not much for doing Scottish
folk music in the normal course of things. But he had been deprived
of playing since his nephew forbade it, and now he played as if
anyone who tried to take his fiddle from him again would have to
pry it, as the NRA slogan went, from his cold, dead
fingers.

"Someone should teach him
'MacPherson's Lament,'" Faron remarked.

"Do I know that one?"

"About the famous fiddler who was
going to be hanged, and when people came from all around to see the
execution, hoping to buy his fiddle after he was dead, he broke the
fiddle instead of parting with it."

"Good for MacPherson and good for you,
honey," Ellie said. "I think the old fiddler just helped you
recover another song. But I also don't think he would have given
you his violin if he didn't have more respect for musical
instruments than that."

But as they listened to the music, the
swish of tires through mud and the rumbling of an engine announced
the arrival of another car, which parked in front of the
cottage.

A tall, gray-haired man unfolded
himself from the driver's seat and an elfish dark-haired woman
popped out of the passenger seat, followed by a very black man in a
Polar Circalen sweatshirt and a Laplander hat in blue and red with
white rickrack trim. From the backseat, another black man, a black
woman, and three smallish blond people clad alike in jeans and
ice-blue and purple anoraks stepped out onto the gravel
driveway.

"Wow, great!"
said Dan, who was, of course, the tall,
gray-haired man. "They're having a party and it
looks like they've already made friends with some Gypsies. This is
going to be super!"

He rushed into the cottage while Terry
and the newcomers began unloading instruments from the boot of the
car.

"Hey, gang!" Dan yelled from the
doorway, then saw Uncle Theo in the middle of the room playing.
"Oops," he said in a whisper, and grinned at Giorgio's wife and
whispered to Faron and Ellie, "You're going to love these guys
we've brought back from Norway and Iceland. Gachero and his friends
know more of the Icelandic songs than Torun, Solveg, and Søren
do."

One of the Gypsy men emerged from the
bedroom with an armload of clothing. Giorgio's wife, who snapped
out of her trance when the newcomers arrived, set the
banjo-broadcasting phone thoughtfully down on the windowsill and
withdrew her dagger from her sash, fingering the blade and flashing
a wide golden smile at Dan. "Hello," she said.