The Avalon Chanter (6 page)

“
We have only her word for when she
discovered the body.”

“
Well yes, but—Tara was there, too.
Wasn’t she? We had to bully her into taking us to the
scene.”

Unsurprisingly, Alasdair committed himself to
nothing.

Maggie and Tara stopped by the Land Rover,
Tara looking back at Jean and Alasdair. “I’ll run you into the
village as soon as I’ve got Mags squared away.”

“
Thank you,” Alasdair replied. “We’ll
walk. It’s not so far.”

“
You think? You could walk to the far
end of the island in half an hour. Whatever, the B and B’s just
this side of the pub, on the corner of Cuddy’s Close.”

“
Thanks.”

Instead of climbing into the car themselves,
mother and daughter walked on down the narrow blacktop road, past
the cemetery, past the darkened church. Jean and Alasdair followed
a discreet dozen paces behind. Enough light was left for her to
read the sign with its simple Church of England cross-in-a-circle
logo: The Parish Church of St. Hilda.

Tara steered Maggie along the low stone wall
surrounding the manse, the vicar’s house between the church and the
music school, through a wrought-iron gate and up the garden
path.

“
I guess Farnaby’s church doesn’t rate
a full-time vicar anymore,” said Jean.

Alasdair replied, “Nothing like the Lauders
living above the shop.”

The manse’s Gothic Revival details seemed
overwrought compared with the simplicity of the other buildings in
the village. Light shone from the windows, defining their pointed
arches, and from the ceiling of a porch whose support posts were
decorated with scalloped trim. In other parts of England the
protuberance of the porch would be hung with vines. This one
sported a couple of shovels leaning against a post and a wicker
basket holding what looked like scraps of stone. What an American
would call the front yard was filled with more unkempt garden beds.
A large wheelbarrow rusted away beneath a hillock of weeds, and the
water in a birdbath was slimed with algae.

The door opened. A stooped, scrawny woman
peered out. Her white hair was set in the bangs and flipped ends of
the sixties and a knitted shawl in a subtle shade of purple draped
her shoulders. “Maggie? Where were you?”

“
I was over at the priory, Mum, as
usual.” Maggie’s voice carried the forced cheerfulness usually
applied to a fretful child.

Elaine’s voice sounded thin and tentative.
“Is your father there? He’s late for his, his—the meal. Tea.”

After what Jean could only call a pregnant
pause, Maggie replied, “He’s not coming tonight, Mum.”

“
Oh. Pity.” The pallid face turned
toward Tara. “How do you do. I don’t believe we’ve been
introduced.”

“
Tara Hogg,” the young woman told
Elaine. “Nice to meet you.”

Jean’s stroll slowed to a dawdle. She
tried to reconcile this haggard woman with the elegant studio
portrait on the back of Elaine Lauder’s controversial
The Matter of Britannia
, a book that
had thrown a few scholarly planets out of their orbits at its
publication. She tried to reconcile this woman with Maggie, for
that matter, to no avail.

A woman about Tara’s age drew Elaine back
into the house. From her smock with its glint of a name tag and the
tidy binding of her red hair, Jean deduced she served as a nurse or
home health aide.

Maggie and Tara stepped over the threshold
and the door shut with a solid thunk, cutting off the sound of a
clock striking.

“
What a shame,” Jean told Alasdair.
“According to the date on that gravestone, Elaine’s seventy-five.
These days that’s not much past middle-aged.”

“
That’s as may be, but it’s not making
you and me teenagers. Time we were feeding ourselves and settling
in for the night.” Alasdair’s large, strong hand on the small of
her back urged her on.

One last backwards glance showed her
the sign on the garden gate that she’d missed when they’d sped past
earlier.
Gow House
. Wat must
have named his home for Neil Gow, the legendary fiddler.

The school building was the newest one
on the road, by a century at least, built in the uninspired style
of the nineteen-eighties that seemed to Jean’s eye to be no style
at all. Its sign read
Gallowglass School of
Traditional Music
. What sort of traditional music
wasn’t specified, but then, the school was located in Northumbria,
home of multiple mixed and matched traditions. Gallowglass had made
its reputation adding new world beats to old British songs, in a
genre Jean thought of as Country Eastern. A shame the school was no
longer open year-round, but Wat’s injuries and subsequent death had
deprived it of a permanent artist-in-residence.

There, too, windows gleamed. Through them
came the sound of fiddles, an accomplished one carrying the tune, a
bouncy jig, several others squeaking along behind. The leader had
to be Hugh Munro, punctilious as usual about training up the
younger generation in the way in which it should go. They’d either
catch up with him at the B&B or at the pub.

In a silence less companionable than mutually
puzzled, Jean and Alasdair walked around the hairpin turn and onto
the main street of Farnaby St. Mary. Gulls squawked overhead,
sounding a little like the student violins. Somewhere in the
darkness beyond the pebbled beach the sea murmured, and the horizon
rose and fell gently in the last glimmer of daylight.

They could keep on going, Jean thought. It
wasn’t their case. They had no battles to fight here, other than
academic interest in the chapel and the constant gnawing of
curiosity. But short of commandeering one of the kayaks on the
breakwater and heading for Lindisfarne, where the causeway was
open, they were stranded.

The sign reading
The Queen’s Arms
creaked in the wind. According
to a small sign high on the pub’s side wall, the cobblestoned
alleyway running alongside was named Cuddy’s Close. Cuddy, also
known as Cuthbert, Lindisfarne’s other saint. Supposedly his body
was still intact in its shrine in Durham Cathedral.

They could safely assume, Jean told herself,
that the body in St. Genevieve’s chantry chapel was not that of
Cuthbert. That was about all they could assume.

The reddish gray walls of the house on
the corner indicated that it, like so many other buildings in
Farnaby St. Mary, had been built with stones robbed from the
priory. Its front window displayed a placard reading,
Angle’s Rest B&B
.
Four stars.
“Here we are,” Alasdair
said, and opened the door for Jean.

Chapter Six

“
Hello?” Alasdair called.

“
There you are!” A pleasantly
upholstered woman popped out of a side door into the hallway,
bringing with her a scent of baking bread that made Jean go weak in
the knees. “Lance turned up with your cases ever so long ago, I
thought you’d changed your minds and moved into the students’
hostel down the way.”

“
We were delayed,” Jean evaded, and
went on to introduce herself and her spousal unit.

The woman’s handshake was brisk, firm, and
slightly floury. “Oh, sorry.” She wiped her hands on the front of
her apron, succeeding only in rearranging the dusting of flour
already there. “Penelope Fleming. Pen, that is. We’ve got no need
for ancient Greek names here on Farnaby. Your room’s just up the
stairs here.”

She led the way, giving Jean a good look at
her back, from chestnut-brown pincurls to a capacious purple
sweatsuit to fuzzy pink bunny slippers. “Hugh Munro’s in the single
room down the hall here, and the Campbell-Reids will be in the
double on the ground floor when they arrive tomorrow. It’s all
ready for them, save adjusting the cot for the size of the
child.”

“
She’s almost ten months old,” said
Jean. “She can pull herself up but isn’t walking yet.”

“
Oh, a lovely little lass, I’m
sure.”

With a long way to go before she found
herself forty and facing a mid-life crisis.

A sitting area at the top of the stairs had
room for two easy chairs, a table piled with magazines, and a
padded window seat. On it lay a lump of fur striped in gray and
black—which opened one golden eye, considered the newcomers,
flicked a whisker in disdain, and closed the eye again.

“
You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”
Pen asked. “I’ll bring Hildy downstairs if so.”

“
No, no,” Jean assured her. “We have
one of our own back in Edinburgh.”

“
Edinburgh’s a brilliant town, isn’t
it? The theaters, the restaurants—you’ll be thinking you’ve come to
the ends of the earth here.” Pen threw open a door. Her smile
beamed not only from her lips but from her plump cheeks, and her
hazel eyes, nested in equally upturned wrinkles, were framed by
oversized glasses. “Here you are. No matter where you go, there you
are, eh?”

Smiling in return, Jean looked around the
room. Soft colors, floral fabrics, landscape photos. Windows on
both the right- and left-hand walls. A wide bed, chairs and a table
with a tea set. A subtle odor of fresh potpourri. A U-turn brought
her to a sparkling clean bathroom and a closet where their
suitcases sat ready on racks. What would Pen have had to do to rate
five stars? Gild the water faucets? “It’s perfect. Thank you. Just
one thing.”

“
What can I be doing for you, Miss
Fairbairn?”

“
Jean, please.” She leaned closer to
the picture hanging next to the bathroom door, a close-up of the
tower atop the headland. In the tenuous spring light of the
photo—light much like today’s—the massive stones of the bailey wall
surrounding a small roofless keep seemed brutal, laid down by
giants in some antediluvian era. “What’s this tower? Is it a
fort?”

“
Oh, aye, mostly dating to Tudor days,
like the fortlet on Lindisfarne that’s now Lindisfarne Castle.
Though Elaine went poking about there once upon a time and thinks
the foundations are those of a watchtower dating to the Viking
raids.”

“
I can see the priories on Farnaby and
Lindisfarne setting up an early-warning system.”

Alasdair stepped up to take a look. “This
one’s not been renovated into a mansion, though.”

“
No, and more’s the pity,” Pen replied.
“The Castle is lovely now, isn’t it?”

“
Yes, it is,” said Jean.

“
Elaine and Wat were going on about a
similar job on Merlin’s Tower.”

“
Merlin’s Tower?”

Pen shrugged. “Elaine’s thinking the name’s
no older than Victorian times. Any road, she and Wat were planning
to renovate the tower after he retired. Even had an architect in
from Alnwick. The place is habitable, but only just. Music, though,
it’s like the priesthood, you never truly retire.” Pen’s slight
frown segued into a firm smile that rejected images of Wat taken
before his time and ailing Elaine. “Is there anything else?”

“
Can we have ourselves a meal in the
pub next door?” Alasdair asked.

“
Oh my, yes—James has all the
basics—James, he’s my husband, call us the Trumps of Farnaby St.
Mary, real estate moguls, right?”

“
Right.” Judging by his grin, even
Alasdair was charmed. “Cheers.”

They should bottle this woman and spray her
over various government assemblies, not to mention ranting talking
heads. She was not only infectiously good-natured, she now backed
away toward the door without demanding further conversation.
“Breakfast is at eight unless you’d rather have it earlier. There’s
a bit of a menu just there on the desk. Ta ta for now.” And the
door shut.

Jean glanced not at the list of foods on the
menu but at the name at its top. “Not only did I say Angler’s Rest
to Lance, when I first booked the place I read it as Angel’s Rest.
You’re always seeing ‘angel’ for ‘angle’ and vice versa.”

“
You and your proofreader’s eye.”
Alasdair opened his suitcase.

“
Angles. Saxons. Jutes. And later on,
Vikings and Danes. Some people called them pirates, but they saw
themselves as bold explorers, opening up new lands, never mind
people were already living there. Kind of like Attila and his
Huns.”

“
Eh?”

“
Saint Genevieve supposedly saved Paris
from Attila the Hun in the fifth century. That was a time of
barbarian invasions into the old Roman Empire, the era of a
historical King Arthur . . . Well, Maggie’s got to have more going
for herself than a connection that slender, I don’t care how
ambitious she is.”

“
Eh?” Alasdair repeated, a little
louder.

Jean started pulling items from her suitcase,
beginning with her tablet computer. “Earlier you were wondering if
it was a coincidence Maggie moved back to Farnaby to help her
parents and still managed to make a brilliant discovery.”

“
Oh aye, coincidences happen, but it’s
her finding a grave worth presenting a press conference, in her own
garden or so nearly as makes no difference, that’s making me
itch.”

“
You and me both. Farnaby isn’t the end
of the Earth, Pen to the contrary, but Maggie still might feel as
though her career’s been put on hold here.”

“
There you are, motivation for—well,
I’m not suggesting she’s salted the dig, just that she’s making a
mountain from a molehill.”