The Avalon Chanter (2 page)

Every one of the tight-lipped departing
passengers held some sort of electronic slave—a smartphone, a
laptop, a tablet. One man whose prison pallor, colorless hair, and
sagging physique indicated long years of hunching over electronic
slaves used his iPad to photograph Lindisfarne and its shadow,
Farnaby. Jean sensed her brethren and sistren from the fourth
estate.

So did Alasdair. “Your lot,” he said from the
corner of his mouth.

“
Yep.” She homed in on the photo-taking
man, the only one standing still. “How did the opening of the tomb
in the chantry chapel go? Any big revelations or no more than
another medieval nobleperson?”

“
Ah, Loony Lauder and her dog and pony
show, with no dogs and no ponies. No worms, come to
that.”

“
The grave was empty?”

“
Who’s to know? She cancelled the
entire do. Instead, she sat us all down in the church and tried to
buy us off with tea, scones, and a lecture on some Dark Age cavalry
bloke. Dead loss, save for the scones.” His blunt fingertips tapped
the screen. “This lot, in church? Surprised we weren’t struck by
lightning.”

“
Some Dark Age cavalry bloke? As in,
Arthur, King of the Britons? You know, Camelot. Lancelot.
Guinevere. Not that any of them actually existed, although
according to Professor Lauder’s mother . . .”

“
Jean!” Alasdair called. “The ferry’s
away!”

“
Farnaby,” said the reporter. “Loony
Lauder. Better you than me, luv. Much better.” He strolled toward
the parked cars, so focused on his tablet Jean figured he only knew
she was female from her voice.

She hustled on down to the dock, telling
herself the man must work for a tabloid. He was probably texting
the office in a plea not for hazard but for boredom pay—no dead
body and any living ones having nothing to do with celebrities such
as, say, Princess Kate, as many Americans called her. But if not
for the honorary “Duchess of Cambridge,” her name would be Princess
William, counterintuitive as that sounded. A princess by
marriage.

Past a battered, out-of-style phone booth—a
direct connection to ferry HQ on the island, Jean suspected—and a
garishly red life preserver like a huge cherry, well, Life Saver,
and she reached the end of the metal gangplank. Alasdair left their
bags standing on the deck of the boat and stepped back to seize her
elbow and steady her up the slope of the surface.

“
Thanks,” she said, the final sibilant
concealed by the squeal of the rising gangplank.

Chapter Two

The gangplank thudded home. Engines roared. A
tall muscular young man wearing the universal uniform of T-shirt,
jacket, and jeans leaped from empty dock to deserted deck. He
coiled the mooring ropes, then stepped forward, hand extended.
“That’ll be five pound each.”

Alasdair reached into his pocket before Jean
could bring her mini-backpack around. “Locals ride for free, do
they?” he asked.

“
We’ve got us a subsidy from
Westminster, being the only public access to the island.” The man
crammed the bills into a pocket, adding with a grin so broad every
white tooth gleamed with good humor, “Never you mind, Jock, you’ll
get your five quid worth of scenery.”

Alasdair’s neutral expression crackled with
frost. So close to the Border, and he was already hearing Scots
jokes.

An older, rather shrunken version of the
young man emerged from a superstructure that appeared to be bridge,
crew quarters, and passenger waiting room all in one. With his
jacket and peaked cap, to say nothing of the gray stubble on the
lower half of his weather-beaten face, he had to be both captain
and father.

“
Mind your manners, lad,” he said, and
to Jean and Alasdair, “I’m Clyde Eccleston. This here’s my boy,
Lance. His sense of humor’s a bit over the top.”

“
Lance” was short for Lancelot, Jean
assumed, an appropriate name for someone probably born and bred in
sight of Bamburgh Castle.

Lance’s crest fell, if only slightly. “Sorry.
No offense.”

“
None taken,” lied Alasdair, and,
thawing, “I’m Alasdair Cameron.”

“
Jean Fairbairn. We were supposed to
attend Professor Lauder’s press conference and . . .” She stopped
before she said,
dog and pony
show
, although in academia dogs and ponies were likely
to perform amazing tricks. “Well, I hear she called it
off.”

“
She opened the grave and found
nothing?” asked Alasdair.

“
No,” Eccleston Senior replied before
Jean could. “She cancelled the do before it started. No reason I
could see, but then, wasn’t my party, was it? I’m only ever carting
folk back and forth, music students, twitchers after counting their
birds, wildfowlers after shooting them, divers, even the odd
tourist, though never so many as go out to Lindisfarne.”

“
I’ve been to Lindisfarne a couple of
times, but never to Farnaby.” She didn’t add that if Maggie
Lauder’s hypothesis held up, Clyde and Lance could see a surge in
business. Although what Jean often saw were metaphorical castles in
the air crashing down, undermined by reality. She’d been
responsible for more than a little undermining herself.

Sidling back toward his command center, Clyde
added over his shoulder, “The Lauder clan’s good folk, never mind
being newcomers to Farnaby. Wat and Elaine came in as newlyweds,
fifty years ago. Maggie was born here, bonniest lass you’ve ever
seen, and now—forty if she’s a day.”

“
That clock keeps right on ticking,”
Jean murmured.

“
They’ve all gone traveling, mind you,
but they’ve always come back. Somewhat peculiar, the womenfolk are,
poking about things all dead and gone. But the music’s good, and
who isn’t peculiar, in their own way?”

Jean grinned at that and glanced at Alasdair,
who shrugged agreement. Clyde seemed happy to cut Maggie Lauder
slack. The reporter in the car park and his colleagues would
not.

The boat lurched, hitting the slow swell of
the sea. Simultaneously Alasdair and Jean spun toward and down onto
a bench beside the railing. Lance, unsurprisingly much more sure of
foot, ambled away across the expanse of deck. His tanned face and
blue eyes beneath a mane of flaxen hair made him look like a
throwback to his Viking forebears. All he needed was a horned
helmet and berserker’s sword.

“
The Ecclestons have likely lived on
Farnaby for generations,” Alasdair said.

“
No surprise Clyde called the Lauders
newcomers.”

“
Newcomers or not, they’ve all had fine
careers, by the sounds of it.”

Lance avoided a rusty, muddy puddle only to
step in proof that the ferry also transported cows and sheep.
Alasdair’s eyes crinkled in mingled sympathy and entertainment.

“
Oh yeah,” Jean said. “Wat and
Gallowglass, Elaine and her literary studies, and now Maggie,
digging all over the UK. She was part of the team at the recent
Winchester Cathedral excavation, for example, and has worked off
and on at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. She’s worked on digs in
other countries, too.”

“
Ambitious, is she?”

“
Ambitious and smart—she’s worked hard
to get a good academic reputation to complement the model citizen
bit.”

“
You’ve met her, then.”

“
At the odd conference, where we talked
about forensics, historiography, archaeology—research stuff, not
our own backgrounds. Which is understandable. I may have an
academic scandal in my past, but a murder trial is another order of
magnitude. She was accused of killing her boyfriend, wasn’t
she?”

“
Bagging the unfaithful lover’s a
traditional sport. The tabloid lot will have another go at her now.
Cancelling her press conference will not be improving their
temper.”

“
No, it won’t,” agreed Jean. “She’s
shot herself in the foot. In the column inches. Peculiar, like
Clyde said.”

“
Scholars can be a bit peculiar,”
Alasdair said with a thin smile—
just
teasing
. “Has she ever been married?”

“
Only to her work, so far as I know,
hence the good academic reputation.”

“
You can be having the one with the
other, surely.”

“
Not necessarily.” Jean’s first husband
had magnanimously allowed her to get her doctorate because the
university would pay her more if she had “Ph.D.” behind her name.
“Who
did
kill Maggie’s
boyfriend, way back when? Or is it a cold case?”

“
Now, now, earlier the day you were
after letting bygones be bygones.”

“
I’m curious. As well as
peculiar.”

This time he didn’t stop with a thin smile
but unleashed a full grin. “I’m thinking a chap was eventually sent
down for the crime—bagging the rival’s a tradition as well—but it
all played out in Cambridge, mind you, where Maggie attended
university, nowhere near my patch in Inverness. I was no more than
a constable, then. An ambitious one.”

“
Ah, a man in uniform,” Jean said with
an exaggerated sigh. “Smart in both meanings of the
word.”

Lance strolled back by, whistling the
old folk tune “Maggie Lauder.”
Wha wadna be
in love wi’ bonnie Maggie Lauder?

Funny how he brought a sarcastic tone
to a simple whistle. But then, Jean knew the words.
For I’m a piper to my trade; My name is Rob the
Ranter: The lasses loup as they were daft, When I blaw up my
chanter . . .
It said something about her louping, or
leaping, brain cells that she always read a double meaning into the
story of Maggie, dancing madly as the piper plied his chanter—the
clarinet-like part of the bagpipes on which the tune was actually
played. The business end, so to speak.

“
I’m sure the poor woman’s heard every
possible joke about her name,” she told Alasdair. “A shame her
parents couldn’t resist. Wat wasn’t even a piper, but played the
fiddle and guitar like Hugh. I wasn’t really familiar with
Gallowglass until last year . . .” She let the sentence die away,
remembering the circumstances under which she’d gotten to know
Gallowglass.

“
You’ve made up for lost time.”
Alasdair no doubt visualized the length of her trad-music playlist.
“Her mum’s an academic as well? Your lot again?”

Jean had been a history professor a lot
longer than she’d been a journalist. “Elaine was an academic, yes,
before she—I hate to say, lost her mind. You don’t lose your mind
the way you misplace an umbrella. Succumbed to dementia. Miranda
says Maggie came back to Farnaby to care first for her father and
then for her mother.”

“
Pity. Still, Maggie looks to have made
a discovery. A grand coincidence, that. Or is it?”

Alasdair’s tone was so freighted with
skepticism Jean elbowed him lightly in the ribs, in companionship
rather than criticism. She might be a detective by marriage, but
skepticism was a characteristic of both their former lives. “Spoken
like a cop.”

Alasdair nodded acknowledgment.

“
The guy I talked to said she tried to
buy the reporters off with a lecture on King Arthur. No surprise
there, not with her mother’s work on Guinevere and her own on the
Anglo-Saxon invasions.”

“
He’d rather have had her open Arthur’s
grave, I reckon. A skeleton in armor, holding a sign reading,
‘Merlin was here.’ If that’s where you’re thinking she’s
going.”

“
Don’t laugh. Elaine’s not the only
scholar to maintain Merlin actually existed. So yeah, I think
that’s where she’s going. There’s no better way to get the British
press and academia both to sit up and take notice than produce some
relic of Arthur. You remember all the hysteria in ninety-eight,
over an inscription from Cornwall with the close-but-no-cigar name
of Artognou.”

“
No, I’m not remembering that at all.
At the time I was right distracted by more contemporary
matters.”

“
Well, yeah, you were.”

“
As for Professor Lauder’s motives,”
Alasdair counseled, “and what’s gone wrong with her plans, we’ll be
learning in due course.”

“
But speculating without evidence is
one of my favorite hobbies, right up there with jumping to
conclusions.”

“
That it is.”

Not that she had any evidence to speculate
with right now. Had Maggie gone out on an inferential limb, only to
find some source that snapped it off at the last minute? She could
have saved more face—and less media criticism—by opening an empty
grave than by turning uncooperative.

Waves dashed against the sides of the boat
and a fine spray of sea water flecked Jean’s glasses. Through them
she saw Lindisfarne seeming to rise and fall on the horizon, a low
green land spiked at one end with the rooftops of the village, the
broken arches of the medieval priory, and the small but pronounced
protuberance of the castle.

Farnaby Priory was the stepsister of the
famous monastery on Lindisfarne, first established by the Irish
Saint Aidan and Anglo-Saxon King Oswald in the seventh century.
Farnaby had been a nunnery, women only, rather than a mixed house
in Celtic fashion like the one at nearby Coldingham, ruled by an
abbess. But that sort of equality and siblinghood had been stamped
out by the Roman church early on, even before Viking sails appeared
on the horizon and Viking warriors stamped out more than religious
custom. By the time William the Conqueror’s Norman knights moved
into the area in the eleventh century, little was left of the
original priories.