The Avalon Chanter (22 page)

She didn’t speak waspishly, Jean
estimated, but resignedly. Rebecca scooted to the side and kept on
brushing.
No, really, I’m not here at
all.

“
My youth was more peculiar than most,”
returned Maggie. “I long ago gave up keeping it all secret. Secrets
hurt, even when they’re meant to protect. Especially when they’re
meant to protect. When Tara reached eighteen I sent her a message
through the adoption agency, asking if she’d like to meet up. She
said yes. Now she’s spending a term here. A semester, you lot call
it.”

“
Maybe not my smartest decision.”
Tara’s own smile was much more rueful than wistful.

“
I searched out Donal’s other daughter,
Tara’s sister, and found her working as a nurse in a care home in
Newcastle. When my mother needed more care than I could provide, I
asked her to come to us.”

“
I didn’t know who Maggie was, not till
she told me.” The resigned tone in Niamh’s voice sharpened with
bitterness. “My mum divorced my dad when he went to prison—no
standing by her man, thank you very much. Still, she sent him my
school photos and the like for quite a few years, but he never
replied, and she gave it up as a bad job. Never thought of himself
as more than the sperm donor, I reckon.”

“
Times two,” Tara said.

“
I arranged for a DNA test. Tara and I,
we have the same father—no question about it.”

“
One who should be ashamed of himself,”
added Tara.

“
There’s enough shame to go round.”
Maggie once again leaned into the grave.
Dink-dink
. “I suppose I could ask for a DNA
sample from Tom’s—from the body that was hidden here, compare it
against my own. I’m not sure I want to know whether Mum, well . .
.”

“
Too much information?” asked Tara, but
she grinned as she said it. “Been there, done that,
bio-Mom.”

Niamh chuckled. Maggie emitted a dry
snort.

Oh yeah,
Jean
thought. Gone were the days when sexual matters had to be ignored
at all costs. Now the pendulum had swung so far toward public pubic
exposure that she felt nostalgic for fig leaves.

She blinked, and blinked again, as though the
damp gauziness hanging before her eyes was in her vision, not in
the air itself. The fog pressed against the windows and the door
like dirty cotton candy. She wasn’t so sure the ceiling hadn’t sunk
further into the room. But none of the other women seemed
oppressed. Physically oppressed, at least.

She imagined Grinsell walking in to see a
group of women caring and sharing and exchanging blunt remarks
about the opposite sex. He’d go nuts.

Was he still alive? If not, he really could
come walking in.

Jean stepped farther away from the door and
closer to one of the light stanchions. “There’s already evidence
for Arthur and Merlin as historical characters. Adding Guinevere to
the list would be quite a coup for you, Maggie. You’d have
vindicated your mother’s work.”

“
Guinevere?” repeated Rebecca, darting
a sharp upward glance at Jean that no doubt meant,
There’s a detail you forgot to tell me.
Before Jean could speak, though, she rallied. “Ah, well, of
course. Elaine believed Guinevere to be historical, and someone
historical needs a grave.”

“
It all started when Mum went against
Wat’s wishes and went away to Cambridge to read Dark Age literature
in the Oliver Montagu Phillips library,” Maggie explained. “It all
continued when Mum decided I should be living her life over again,
doing it properly this time round. So away to Cambridge I went as
well. And then I ended being indirectly responsible for Oliver the
third’s death. Twist of fate. Irony of ironies.”

Tara looked one way, Niamh the other.

“
According to the notes at the end
of
Britannia
, a Dark Age
manuscript is where Elaine found evidence for Guinevere and
Merlin’s sister Gwendeth being the same woman.” Saying “crazed
extrapolation” instead of “evidence” would have been more truthful
but less diplomatic, Jean reminded herself. “But you said she
planned a sequel about Gwen-whosis’s cult here on Farnaby. Did she
find something in the manuscript library about that,
too?”

“
Not really, no. She said she heard a
woman’s voice whilst gardening in the cloister. Hilda. Not Whitby’s
saint, but the seventh-century prioress—although Mum thinks
Farnaby’s Hilda is the youthful, magical avatar of Whitby’s. Either
way, it was Hilda who told her the secret history of the convent,
how it had grown up round Queen Guinevere’s burial
place.”

“
Told her in contemporary
English?”

“
Good point. Mum heard a voice, I
expect, but it was her own. Especially since she’d written a small
book about Hilda, based on her work in the Phillips
library.”

“
Hilda, the original flying nun.” Jean
said nothing about provocative autographs.
Where the bodies are buried.

“
Flying nun. Isn’t that an old TV
show?” Tara asked.

“
I told Mum more than once she should
have the grave slab up and be done with it. But she was squeamish.
She was literary, not scientific. She was loony, folk said. Loony
Lauder. Now that’s what folk will be calling me, especially after
all this.” She gestured around the chapel. “One of the reporters
muttered that yesterday morning, thought I couldn’t hear
him.”

“
Someone familiar with Elaine’s work,”
said Rebecca, half to herself.

I bet I know which reporter
that was,
Jean said, entirely to herself.

“
Now I know why Mum didn’t want the
slab up, don’t I? She already had it up, and cracked it, and tried
to mend it. She had it up to hide her lover’s body. Did Wat kill
him? A chanter through the mouth is a crime of passion if ever
there was one. Makes Oliver and Donal and the shotgun look right
dull.”

Jean cautioned, “You don’t know Thomas Seaton
was her lover. You don’t know who killed him, or who put his body
here. You don’t even know if he really is the body in the grave,
for that matter.”

“
True. Just now I’d settle for learning
whose grave this was originally.”

“
Mother Hilda’s, the
prioress?”

“
Probably, but hope springs eternal.
For one thing, why would Hilda be buried in a Roman-era-style
coffin?”

“
Perhaps it was recycled as a mark of
honor.” Rebecca put down the brush. “You’re about ready for the can
opener.”

“
Yes.” Maggie set aside her hammer and
chisel. From the shadow at the side of the dais she picked up two
cloth bands and attached the end of one to a long, thin, metal rod.
She worked first that cloth, then the other one, into the gap
around the lid of the coffin and through to the other side. Rebecca
seized the ends and pulled them through.

Within moments Maggie and her impromptu
apprentice had attached the bands to the block-and-tackle. “All
right then,” she said to Tara, and Tara took a series of
photos.

Then Maggie reached for a pair of metal
snips. She angled them toward one of the strips of lead still
attaching the lid of the coffin to its sides, then retracted her
hand. “I considered trying to lift the entire coffin. I could set
myself up a lab in the old book shop—Grinsell’s incident room—and
do a proper exam. But the body of the coffin’s bound to be too
heavy, thin or not. So we’re dealing with the lid alone.”

Elaine, thought Jean, hadn’t opened the tomb
because she didn’t want to be proved wrong. And now Maggie didn’t
want to prove Elaine wrong. Unopened, it was Schrödinger’s grave,
both the last resting place of Guinevere and the last resting place
of Elaine’s Arthurian dream.

Again she reached forward, then again sat
back. “Mum said that Farnaby is Avalon. Arthur was carried to
Avalon by women. Earlier people would bury their dead on islands,
to prevent them from returning to haunt the living, and Farnaby’s
been associated with women since records began. She etymologized
the name as Freya-byrig, the settlement of Freya, the great Norse
mother-goddess. But the name is from ‘farna’, or pilgrim, after St.
Cuthbert’s hermitage on the Farne Islands, farther out to sea.
Farnaby would have had another name in Arthur’s day. Mum proposed
all sorts derived from Latin, Brythonic, Goidelic. She tried to
relate ‘Medraut,’ Mordred’s name in the old chronicles, with an
early name for Lindisfarne—Medcaut or Metcaud. But the human mouth
can only make so many sounds. Most similarities are no more than
coincidence.”

Rebecca used her forefinger to remove another
curl of lead. Tara considered the tray of tools. Niamh glanced at
her watch. Jean waited while Maggie played devil’s advocate with
herself.

“
The Priory of Saint Mary,” Maggie went
on. “Saint Mary the Virgin? Or Mary Magdalene, appropriate for
Guinevere, and Mum, and me, save the Magdalene’s story as a
cautionary tale of a misbehaving woman is no more than propaganda
put about by the church patriarchs. Hilda the mystic, Hilda of
Whitby. Saint Genevieve.”

“
I’m pretty sure,” Jean said, “the
rumor of Saint Cuthbert being prejudiced against women is just
that, rumor, but if it were true, having Farnaby on his doorstep
might have colored his opinion. Even if the attribution to Saint
Genevieve is much later.”

“
An island of women, luring men to
their doom,” said Rebecca. “The Lorelei. The sirens.”

“
So,” Jean concluded, “if Lindisfarne
is the Holy Island, is Farnaby the Holier Than Thou
Island?”

As though the words had broken a spell,
Maggie laughed. So did the others, their laughter seeming to
lighten the genuine as well as the metaphorical air.

Something fluttered and flapped in the
sanctuary. Niamh jumped, then laughed again, short and
self-conscious. “Crows or ravens. There are always a few about the
priory.”

“
There you are,” said Rebecca. “The
Irish mother goddess, Morrigan, was attended by crows or ravens.
That’s in the Gallowglass song, isn’t it?”

Maggie nodded. “ ‘The Ravens of
Avalon.’ Mum wrote the words and the melody. Dad embellished it and
claimed it as his, no surprise there.” Her face pale but composed,
she leaned into the tomb.
Snip.
She turned at another angle.
Snip.
She scrambled around to the far side of the
rectangle.
Snip. Snip.

Jean took a step closer to the scene of the
action, then, with visions of the lid swinging back and forth like
Edgar Allan Poe’s scything pendulum, stepped back again to stand
beside Niamh.

The cloth bands tightened. Quickly Maggie
gave Tara the cutting tool. Then she and Rebecca, as cautiously as
though they lifted a bucket of nitroglycerin, operated the
block-and-tackle.

The ropes creaked, but the lid of the coffin
rose silently and hung from the bands. Dust particles drifted
downward, each a golden mote.

“
Hand me a torch,” Maggie
ordered.

Tara produced a smaller flashlight, of the
sort you’d keep in a kitchen drawer or glove compartment. Heedless
of the lid swinging gently overhead, Jean pressed forward, Niamh at
her side.

It’ll be a skeleton, she told herself. A
gruesome one, caked with decay, not a nice tidy medical-school or
Halloween-decoration version. It’ll be wearing armor and have a
long sword rusting at its side—it’ll be a man, an Angle,
probably—or it’ll be enveloped in the remains of a wool habit and
its bony fingers will be clutching a rosary—did they have rosaries
in Hilda’s time? She’d have to look it up.

Five heads bumped over the cavity. The light
swept from the upright stones lining the tomb across the uneven
vertical planes of the coffin and down, to reveal . . .

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Chapter Twenty-one

No one spoke. So far as Jean could tell, no
one breathed. She knew she didn’t—until her nervous system did its
thing and she gasped in the taste and smell of mud and decay.

Surely she looked at an optical illusion.
Centuries of accumulated shadow and the mud oozing at the bottom
concealed the body . . .

The bottom was black mud and ooze. A worm
crawled up from the muck, wriggled around blindly, then dived for
cover.

“
The grave’s been robbed,” someone
said, her voice echoing in the pit. Rebecca.

“
Robbers wouldn’t steal the bottom of
the coffin and leave the rest,” said Tara.

“
Perhaps the body’s completely
decomposed,” Niamh suggested.

“
The body in the Sutton Hoo burial is
completely decomposed,” said Jean, “leaving all those marvelous
grave goods behind. But most Christian burials don’t have grave
goods. Or very few.”

Maggie groped behind her, found one of her
metal rods, and thrust it into the bottom of the tomb. The rod
penetrated as far as she could push it without falling face-first
into the hole. She summed up the situation in two words. “Holy
shit.”

“
What’s all this?” asked a young male
voice behind them.

And an older one with a familiar Western
Highlands accent replied. “They’ve opened the grave. Tut’s tomb, is
it?”

Alasdair.
And,
Jean saw as she raised up and swiveled around, his temporary Tonto,
Sergeant Darling. “Tut’s tomb it isn’t,” she told them. “It’s
empty.”