The Avalon Chanter (20 page)

So the walls of the Angle’s Rest did have
ears, Jean thought. If she and Alasdair or anyone else wanted a
private confab, they’d have to go out to the far side of the
breakwater and keep an eye open for submersibles.

Linda overbalanced and fell, narrowly missing
hitting her chin on the table. Rebecca picked her up. “Can’t hold
your crackers, can you now?”

Pen turned a wistful smile on the child. “If
you’ll excuse me—I’m doing a bit of baking—settles the mind as well
as the stomach.” Collecting the plates and the plastic bags, she
headed back to the kitchen.

After a discreet thirty seconds’
silence, Michael murmured, “There now. She came talking to
you
.”

“
Yes,” Jean told him. “That’s a relief,
in a way. I’d hate to think she was uncomfortable with us around.
Or plotting against us, as the case may be. Although she could
still be leading us astray.”

“
Sometimes you’re having to grit your
teeth and trust,” said Rebecca.

Michael asked, “Has anyone questioned the
ferryman yet, asking if Tom ever left the island? Or was he biding
here then?”

“
Darling says Grinsell told him to
bring Clyde into the interview room, but no one had actually talked
to him before we rushed off looking for Grinsell
himself.”

Rebecca turned an appreciative gaze on her
husband. “I think I first fell in love with Michael when he played
his pipes—there’s that indefinable air about a musician, catnip in
sound. I sympathize with Elaine and Tom.”

Michael bowed graciously.

“
Wat liked to play at King Arthur, but
as you heard yourself, he acted far from chivalrously,” Jean
said.

“
Medieval chivalry was just as
thoroughly compartmentalized. Not that the genuine Arthur lived
anywhere near the Middle Ages.”

“
Yes, there’s a myth I can shoot down,
assuming I get an article out of this weekend after all. Speaking
of which, I guess I’ll head over to the priory to see whether
Maggie’s opening the tomb, with or without a journalistic peanut
gallery. I don’t see why she’d care if y’all came, too. There’s
even a carved gravestone you can train your fourteenth-century
expertise on, Michael, although it’s probably older than
that.”

“
Sounds right intriguing,” he replied.
“But no good taking the wean into the chill and damp.”

Rebecca asked, “We’ll draw straws, shall we,
see who gets to go?”

“
No need. My pipes need cleaning and
freshening before playing tonight. I’ll stay with Linda, see if
she’s feeling like napping. So long as you’re taking photos of the
tombstone.”

“
I promise. Half a tick, Jean?”
Clutching a double armful of wriggling child, Rebecca disappeared
down the hall, Michael at her heels. Jean slipped upstairs, where
she ascertained that Hildy had discorporated.

Both windows in the room showed the same
view, a gray smear, although the one in front at least included the
glowing top of a lamppost. And two shadowy figures rounding the
corner into Cuddy’s Close. Trying to see if they were Alasdair and
Darling, Jean cracked the corner of her glasses against the window
and recoiled. Never mind. If he wanted her, he could call. If she
wanted him, she could call.

Well, she always wanted him, she
thought as she pulled on a heavier jacket and opened the door . . .
Wait a minute. She doubled back to see that, no,
Hilda, the Enchanted Prioress
no
longer lay on the bedside table. Pen must have seen it and taken it
back downstairs where it belonged.

The scent of baking scones wafted out
of the kitchen, boding well. With no Campbell-Reids yet in sight,
Jean darted past the dining area into the living room. Alasdair
said he’d found
Hilda
on the
shelf beside
The Matter of
Britannia
.

Prioress, Jean thought as she scanned the
shelves. Abbess. Actress. Authoress. Murderess. Modern speakers
tended to drop the gender-specific ending—a good thing, in her
opinion. Still, she’d recently read an article about an ancient
Egyptian priestess with the headline “Tomb of an Egyptian
Chantress.”

So did a female piper play a chantress?
Would it be round rather than long? Aha, there was
Britannia
,
next to not
only books on Farnaby and Lindisfarne but also to several bound
excavation reports—Winchester, Vindolanda, Yeavering a few miles
away on the mainland. No
Hilda.

Her fingers itched to pull out the
reports, but she forced them to close around
Britannia
instead. The dust jacket, a lush
Pre-Raphaelite image of a red-headed and golden-crowned woman, was
worn and frayed. The flyleaf was indeed autographed, if without the
provocative words of the autograph in
Hilda
.

For James and Pen. Eternal friendship, Elaine
Peveril Lauder.

Eternal
, Jean
told herself. A word with loaded meanings here on
Farnaby.

A thin white rim protruded from the book—an
index card marking a chapter titled, “Guinevere the Christian
Goddess,” one of Elaine’s more controversial and, sadly, incoherent
themes. In it she theorized that the legends of Guinevere being
abducted and rescued indicated an early resurrection scenario,
therefore Guinevere hadn’t retired to a nunnery; she’d founded one
in her own honor. Q.E.D.

The handwriting on the front of the card
wasn’t Elaine’s. Neither was the name. “Athelstan Crawford” was
written above the words, “Granite. Classic Roman 2. Letterbox.”

Athelstan Crawford.
Great name, like that of a Victorian antiquarian—the Saxon
king, grandson of King Alfred the Great, hammer of the Celts and
Vikings, combined with the down-home “Crawford.” Was this man a
relative of P.C. Crawford’s? And what did the card refer to,
anyway?

Jean flipped it over. On the back, written in
a smaller, more feminine hand that might be the weekday version of
Elaine’s Sunday-best signature, was one word, “Merlin.”

Rebecca looked through the doorway.
“Ready?”

Adding more questions to her ever-expanding
list, Jean returned the book to the shelf and herself to the front
hall, whence she and Rebecca eased out onto the sidewalk.

Chapter Nineteen

The palisades of fog only seemed
impenetrable, Jean discovered. If she and Rebecca kept moving, the
pocket of visibility would move along with them. Sort of like
navigating through life, now that she thought about it.

Somewhere an engine revved and slowed and men
shouted, the sounds reverberating in Cuddy’s Close. Trapped in a
soft pocket of damp, Jean felt her way between the pub and the
B&B and up the flight of steps, Rebecca on her heels. The mist
lay chill against her face and her glasses filmed with microscopic
droplets, adding to her disorientation. Put one foot in front of
the other and follow the voices . . .

The pitted blacktop of the parking area.
Moving blurs resolved themselves from the mist. Something large as
a dinosaur, with soft glowing eyes, leaped forward. Jean stopped so
abruptly Rebecca collided with her. “Sorry.”

A group of islanders inspected their muddy
pants legs and congratulated themselves on heaving Clyde’s pickup
out of its pothole. “Thanks, lads. My shout at the pub tonight,”
said Clyde’s voice to a round of cheers. Lance’s voice added, “Ah,
he’ll only be paying for the flavored water, not the good ales,
eh?” Multiple footsteps carried an eerily distorted gust of
laughter away with them.

So, Jean wondered, did Lance bash Grinsell as
a preemptive strike, heading off his potential harassment of Tara?
That wouldn’t be the first time a young buck thought he could
impress the doe with a violent act, but still, even for the young
and testosterone-fueled, it seemed like too much.

The clatter of the engine changed timbre, the
headlights vanished, tires crunched on the lumpy blacktop. Two red
lights faded and vanished along with the noise. If the road lay in
that direction, then the priory was just about—there. Jean guided
her companion across the parking lot and collided with the wall of
the cemetery. Okay—off to the left, then.

Stone arches loomed out of the murk. A
smear of luminescence lightened one area of gray. The light grew
stronger as they crept toward it, until it took on the shape of an
arched doorway. The chapel. The
dink-dink
of metal against metal sounded like
water drops falling from a great height.

“
Whoa,” Rebecca breathed.

Jean turned to see her resting a hand atop a
truncated column. “You’re getting vibes, aren’t you?”

“
There’s a right interesting fifth
dimension to this place, yes. There’s a—memory-image, an
image-memory, if you can call it that—of people screaming, and the
smell of smoke, and Viking raiders running through a church that’s
not this church—it’s got a thatched roof. Even in this climate, a
thatched roof burns very quickly.”

“
That’s the original Farnaby Priory. No
surprise Vikings would hit here when they hit Lindisfarne,
too.”

Rebecca lifted her hand from the cold, damp
stone and scrubbed it on the front of her coat. After a moment,
looking at her own palm as though it belonged to an alien, she
said, “Have you picked up a ghost yet?”

“
Alasdair and I both sensed something
yesterday, when we first arrived. And the nuns are pretty vocal
after dark. But you know how it is. A ghost is never there when you
want it to provide evidence, but it’s always there when you’re
minding your own business.”

“
We’ve heard paranormal plainchant
before,” Rebecca said. “There’s something about those resonances
that transcend time and space.”

“
Yeah, I bet you can still hear the
ancient Egyptians chanting in Luxor.”

Again Jean deployed her sixth sense, like
casting a net out to where strange creatures glided, no more than
shadows in deep water. Yes, she caught a faint stirring in the
ether—the back of her neck alerted with the tickle she always
thought of as the brush of ectoplasm. It wasn’t that someone walked
over her grave, but over the one in the chapel.

The ghost might not be the disembodied spirit
of the man or woman whose body had been hidden in the tomb, though.
It could be the intended beneficiary of the cantarist’s prayers. Or
one of the nuns she’d heard singing. She knew only that it was the
lingering emotion of someone who had not resolved his or her
life.

Unless the chantry ghost was the mystic
Hilda, who had reached for the other side of consciousness and who
had found it . . . A woman’s face materialized from the wreaths of
fog, eyes looking upward, lips parted—it faded out again. A whiff
of incense eddied through the murk, followed by one of cooking
beans. And the blanket of perception lifted from Jean’s
shoulders.

Most spirits lingered because of unfinished
business, but this one lingered as part of her business, still
watching over Farnaby. “I see why Elaine claimed to have a
paranormal informant.”

“
She’d never said anything of the sort
before,” replied Rebecca. “She’d actually spoken out against ley
lines and the like back when folk were criticizing
Britannia
’s
excesses and
calling her Loony Lauder because of it.”

“
Was it her imagination then? Or the
dementia? Pen thinks her saying she had a lover is the dementia,
but maybe she did have a lover—most people keep extramarital
affairs secret, after all. Who knows?” Jean continued on toward the
chapel. “We’ve got the questions we can—I hope—answer. And we’ve
got the ones we’ll never get answers to. Let’s go see which one
we’ve got here.”

“
Let’s,” Rebecca said.

Jean stepped through the door to see
three photographer’s lamps on tall tripods, each connected to a
battery pack, ranged around the open grave. The lights shone so
brightly the fog was reduced to a softening of the windows and
corners, like the effect of a filter over a camera lens. Maggie lay
on her stomach at the edge of the tomb, the rectangular excavation,
her hands moving slowly inside.
Dink-dink.

Above her now rose an inverted V-shaped metal
structure, like the frame for a child’s swing set, dangling a basic
block-and-tackle outfit. The coffin lid was definitely coming up,
then.

Beside Maggie, Tara leaned in with a brush.
The flat tray equipped with trowels, picks, brushes, and other
implements, including a clipboard laden with limp papers and a
camera, sat nearby. Both women looked sharply up when Jean
appeared.

“
Hello. I remembered I was supposed to
be writing an article for
Great Scot
about your work here.”

“
So you are.” Maggie sat up, laid aside
a small hammer and chisel, and considered the mud and ooze caked on
her hands.

Jean was reminded of Niamh’s and Hector’s
bloodstained hands. “You didn’t have the photographer’s lights out
here yesterday,” was all she said.

“
I left them at the house, charging the
batteries, meaning to bring them along to the big reveal for the
reporters. After the small reveal, well, I thought I’d leave the
stage lighting to the police.”

The body being a little more close and
personal, to say nothing of recent, than she’d expected, Jean
concluded.