The Avalon Chanter (4 page)

“
No problem.” Jean turned toward the
father-and-son team of Ecclestons, who had stopped even pretending
to work and were watching the scene before them like spectators at
a rugby match. Flipping her backpack around, she reached inside.
“Lance, could you please take our bags to the Angler’s Rest B and
B? They told me it’s a few steps from the ferry terminal. It
doesn’t look like anything in Farnaby St. Mary is more than a few
steps from the ferry terminal.”

Lance blinked like someone suddenly waked up.
“Angler’s Rest?”

“
That’s The Angle’s Rest,” Clyde said.
“Angles, Saxons, that lot. The Angles landed here, set themselves
up a beachhead, way back when.”

“
Oh,” said Jean. Well, she supposed
people fished here, too. No matter. She held out a five-pound note.
“For your trouble.”

“
Ta.” Lance’s stroll up the ramp was
too stiff to be casual. He accepted the bill and seized the handles
of the two small suitcases. “The B and B’s just along
here.”

“
Thank you,” Alasdair told
him.

Lance took advantage of his proximity to Tara
to lean in close. “Proper little bitch, aren’t you now?”

Well, Jean thought, that was hardly a sweet
nothing.

“
Stuff it where the sun don’t shine,”
Tara hissed back.

Alasdair, at his most expressionless, opened
the back door of the Land Rover and Jean climbed in before the
parade passed her by.

With an unintelligible mutter under her
breath, Tara plucked a smartphone from her pocket. She swiftly
keyed in a text as she slipped behind the wheel, no doubt warning
Maggie about the two stubbornly inquisitive, if hardly unexpected,
new arrivals.

Crawford removed his hat and claimed the
front passenger seat—riding shotgun, an American would say. His
face was so utterly blank, Jean was impressed. Very few people
could do a great stone face as effectively as Alasdair could.
Unless Crawford’s blank face indicated no one home behind it. That
might explain why a man who had to be over forty still served as
the constable in a small seaside community. Although, to be fair,
he might be content where he was, with no ambitions to move up the
ladder. Unlike Alasdair, who’d climbed the ladder so quickly he
came down with a nosebleed.

She shoved a couple of electronic umbilical
cords and a muddy trowel out of her way. The nylon of the seat was
spattered with mud, but every now and then you had to sacrifice
your clothes for a story. She was glancing around to see what was
piled in the back of the vehicle—more digging implements, folders
of computer printouts, a bin holding mud-caked items of the pottery
shard type—when Alasdair clambered into the other side.

Surreptitiously Jean offered him the
flat of her hand.
We’re in! Kudos to the
team!
Instead of returning a high five, though,
Alasdair shot her a stern look. She retracted her hand and tried a
sheepish shrug instead. No, he didn’t like pulling rank, not when
his purpose for doing so was still undefined.

Tara fired up the engine and took off,
flinging Jean against the seat back.

Chapter
Four

Reddish stone, gray stone, and lumpy
white pebbledash facades whizzed by the window. A pub,
The Queen’s Arms
written in Gothic
script on its signboard. A cobblestoned alley. A Co-op grocery
store, where a woman with a shopping bag stepped off the curb, then
stepped quickly back as they sped past. A tea room. The smell of
baking bread and frying potatoes filtered into the musty interior
of the Land Rover and Jean’s stomach emitted a forlorn
growl.

Then they were screeching around a hairpin
turn, climbing a hill behind the village. Jean grabbed for the
handle above the window. The back of Crawford’s head, covered with
the brown stubble of a military-style cut, held perfectly
steady.

A strain of pipe music, bravado in sound
waves, rose and fell. A kilted man with hair so black it glistened
even in the diffused light played a set of Great Highland bagpipes
in front of a long, low building. Two teenagers held chanters to
their lips and presumably followed along.

The village church was a small beige-walled
and tile-roofed structure not much bigger than the vicar’s house
next door, and displayed no more than a stub for a steeple. Both
probably dated to mid-Victorian times, but seemed downright modern
compared to . . .

Yes.
Beyond a
cemetery surrounded by a low stone wall lay Farnaby Priory. When
the vehicle skidded to a stop, Jean was ready. She flung open her
door, leaped out, and tried to check out as much as possible before
any fecal matter started hitting any fans.

Like Lindisfarne, the surviving ruins of
Farnaby Priory had been built in the early Middle Ages of red and
silvery gray sandstone, now sculpted by time and weather into
flowing patterns that seemed more Art Nouveau than Norman French.
Unlike Lindisfarne, Farnaby’s remains were far from dramatic. A
rectangle of roofless walls marked the church, one of them barely
tall enough to retain a row of round-headed windows behind a
columned arcade. What had once been the cloister was filled by a
walled garden, gravel paths laid out between scraggly beds dotted
with flowers and thick with weeds such as thistles and stinging
nettles. A couple of rabbits raced across a shaggy plot of grass
and into the shrubbery.

The other buildings—refectory, prioress’s
hall, kitchens, dormitory—were marked by little more than the
footings of the original walls. Several archaeological test
trenches cut across grassy areas and over walls, their slumping
sides softened by opportunistic plants. Maggie Lauder’s focus had
moved on.

Alasdair stepped up beside her and Jean
pointed to the one roof still intact, its mossy slates peeking over
the windowed wall. “There’s the chapel.”

“
I was thinking chapels were generally
on the east. That’s on the north.”

“
Depends on the lay of the land and the
whims of the builders. Maggie’s trying to prove the chapel has at
least an Anglo-Saxon substructure. If she’s trying to make an
Arthurian connection, then she’s hoping the chapel dates back even
further, to the original Celtic priory. It might. The records don’t
have nearly as much about Farnaby as they do about
Lindisfarne.”

“
Are the records saying anything at
all?”

“
There are legends of an early prioress
with magical powers, but I bet those are typical Celtic saint
stories. All we know for sure is that the chapel isn’t a Lady
Chapel—why should it be, the whole priory is dedicated to St.
Mary—but a chantry chapel. A chapel endowed by somebody wealthy in
honor of a dead relative or comrade or even himself, including
funds to pay a cantarist, a priest, to man it.”

“
A cantarist? Like the cantor in a
Jewish service?”

“
Yep. The root’s from the Latin for
‘sing’,
cantare
or something
like that, although I guess chantry priests didn’t always sing or
chant. The point was to offer prayers to decrease the time the
honored person’s soul spent in purgatory, and to keep on offering
the prayers forever. Forever arrived at the Reformation, though. I
guess purgatory is pretty crowded these days.”

With eerie cries, several
oystercatchers spiraled down into the nearby cemetery and settled
into a circle on the grass. Next to them rose a monument in
polished granite, so new the emblem of a fiddle and bow was still
sharply incised, as were the dates beneath.
Walter “Wat” Lauder
. He had barely achieved his
allotted three score years and ten.

The other half of the monument
displayed a carved scroll, the words
Elaine
Peveril Lauder
, and a birth date two years before
Wat’s. The blank patch of granite yet to be engraved reminded Jean
of an open grave.

“
Jean,” Alasdair said. “We’re
away.”

She looked around to see Tara and Crawford
walking toward the priory. A human figure sat on a broken column
drum in the shadow of the tallest wall. A tentative shadow, the sun
now filtered by cloud and casting not the golden light of early
evening but a thin gilded gleam.

Loony Lauder herself. Stepping lively, Jean
and Alasdair caught up with the others at the gap in the wall that
marked the church’s western door.

Maggie sat in the attitude of Rodin’s
famous statue
The Thinker
,
back curved, elbows braced on thighs, chin set on fist. Her boots,
camouflage pants, and jacket resembled Tara’s. Her body, more
abundant in hips and chest, did not. Neither did her face when she
looked up.

Jean deleted her memory of precise features.
The pale and puffy face before her resembled that of a corpse
pulled from deep water. Maggie’s blue eyes, which had once sparkled
with intellectual inquiry, now seemed reclusive and dull. Her brown
hair, which had once been cut in a short, professional style, was
now long, purplish-red, and tied in a straggling bun atop her
head.

Mid-life crisis, Jean told herself. Go
figure. She and Alasdair had each endured a mid-life crisis and
ended up with each other. The jury was still out on what Maggie
would end up with.

“
Thank you for coming, Edwin. Ms.
Fairbairn, good to see you again. I assume this is Mr. Cameron?”
Maggie’s voice originated in her diaphragm rather than in her sinus
cavities like Tara’s, but still it squealed with
tension.

Murmurs of greeting and handshakes passed
back and forth. “Sorry to get here so late,” Jean went on. “We got
lost—er, took the scenic route—were delayed—I hear Miranda
rang.”

“
Quite so.” Maggie looked past the
red-tiled and gray-slated roofs of the village, more than a few of
them sporting small satellite dishes. She looked past the little
tower atop the cliff over the sea to the smeared streak of the
mainland and the much larger towers of Bamburgh. Tara crossed her
arms and looked down at her boots. Crawford didn’t look at anything
at all, but stood at parade rest, waiting.

Alasdair inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, and when
no one else did, spoke. “I’m hearing things did not exactly go to
plan the day.”

“
Not half. The reporters are no doubt
savaging me in their respective media. I’m an easy
target.”

“
I’ve been there myself, sort of,” Jean
said, partly trying to establish a sisterhood, partly distancing
herself from her ink-stained brethren.

If Maggie heard her, she didn’t reply.
Groaning audibly, she stood up, squared her shoulders, and raised
her chin, leading Jean’s eye upward, but then, most other women,
let alone men, were taller than she was.
Ready, aim . . .
“When the balloon goes up,”
Maggie stated, “anything the media’s said today will be
insignificant. They’ll run mad.”

After a long moment, Alasdair asked,
“Aye?”

“
This morning I had a quick peek into
the tomb, the better to stage the reveal, sort out the lighting and
such. I don’t like surprises. I’ve never been proved more justified
in that sentiment.”

A bagpipe lament, borne on a gust of wind,
swelled, faded, and left a lingering resonance among the broken
arches. Several black birds, crows or ravens, stirred uneasily atop
the walls. One of Gallowglass’s greatest hits, Jean remembered, was
“The Ravens of Avalon.”

“
Well, there’s nothing for it. Come
along.” Maggie strode toward a round-headed door tucked into the
inside corner of the church and disappeared through it. Glancing
almost belligerently over her shoulder at the others, Tara
followed. Crawford paced along a step behind.

Alasdair gestured Jean on ahead. She took one
step out of the wind into the shadowed stillness of the chapel and
stopped dead. She’d expected it to be dank and cold. But the air of
the tiny room, no larger than her and Alasdair’s living room in
Edinburgh, froze her bones. It was so thick with the scents of mud
and decay that she gagged. In that moment she felt not a pricking
of her thumbs, but a prickle of the back of her neck. Her ghostly
early-warning system. Her paranormal detector.

From behind, Alasdair’s hands grasped
her upper arms. He felt it, too.
Steady
on.

Then the spine-tingle evaporated. The
atmosphere in the room lightened to merely chill with an elusive
hint of damp rot. Jean patted Alasdair’s hand—
I’m okay
—and he released her. His voice murmured
so quietly in her ear she had to cock her head back and up to hear
it. “What, or rather who, was that?”

“
We’ll be finding out in due course,”
she whispered back.

“
Yes, dear.”

The others were picking their way around two
fresh test trenches, black gashes cut through uneven flagstones,
toward the largest window in the room. The bits of broken tracery
lining the opening looked like thorns against the darkening eastern
sky. Jean and Alasdair took up their places beside Crawford even as
Tara hung back.

Maggie lifted an industrial-sized flashlight,
large as a policeman’s truncheon, and trained its beam of light
toward a flat box of excavation tools and a rectangular pit at the
front of a low dais—access to a small vault. The last resting place
of the person to whom the chapel had presumably been dedicated, set
into the floor before the now-vanished altar. The pieces of the
slab that had once covered the tomb now leaned against the wall
behind Tara. Surely Maggie hadn’t broken it—that would have been
archaeological heresy.