The Burning Glass (21 page)

Outside, Jean watched the taillights of the
last car flicker past the gate and disappear. The castle door
thudded shut. Alasdair walked briskly down the steps and continued
on to the gate, where he stopped.

The cool air was growing more chill and more
still by the moment. The leaves were no longer rippling, but were
making only the most subtle of motions, as though invisible hands
eased them aside so invisible faces could look between them. Jean
crossed her arms over her chest and moved in a measured stroll
toward Alasdair. He glanced around at the sound of her steps.

“Who was that on the phone?” she asked.

“D.I. Gary Delaney, in person. In a filthy
mood as well. Not so keen on apologizing for ignoring my message
about the answerphone tape, I’m thinking.”

“But still he apologized. That should make
you feel better.” The time for tiptoeing through the thistles of
Alasdair’s feelings was past. And he had feelings. He was not
austere in emotion, just in expression.

“If I’m apologizing,” he said, “for speaking
to you so harshly, will you be feeling better as well?”

Naturally he’d find a way to both apologize
and save face. “Of course I will. How about if I apologize
for—well, darn it, I’m still not sure what I saw last night, if
anything, but I could have said something. I’ve caused you enough
trouble already.”

He pulled her against his side. “No, lass, I
reckon the trouble’s on both sides.”

She sagged against him, wrapping her arm
around his waist. He was still exuding a slight force field that
pushed her away, if only by millimeters.
We’ll manage well
enough
. But wasn’t that what she and Brad had ended up doing,
managing?

The green of the precipitous pasture on the
other side of the road faded. A light shone in Roddy’s farmhouse. A
dog barked, an eerie echo in the silence. And the cows at the top
of the field started for home, lurching down the slope as fast as
they could run. Their bloated bellies swung from side to side above
their spindly legs, like water balloons balanced on toothpicks.
Jean gasped, expecting a twenty-Holstein pileup at the fence, but
no, the cows skidded to a halt, milled around a moment, and then
filed off toward the barn.

Jean laughed. Even better, so did Alasdair.
For one glorious minute they stood laughing together. Then Alasdair
shut and locked the gate. Side by side they headed back toward the
lights and warmth of the flat, pausing only for him to retrieve a
small cardboard box from the shop and lock that door, too. He
locked the door of the flat and tested it twice. So it’s not just
me with nerves, Jean thought.

The flat was filled with the homey fragrance
of chicken soup. Alasdair sniffed the air.

“I fixed dinner,” Jean explained.

“You fixed it? It was broken, then?” He set
the box on the desk and pulled off the lid, revealing a smudged
glass disc and a gold blot resting on a bed of tissue paper.

“Those are the things from the dungeon floor.
You climbed down there? All alone?”

“You’d not be fitting a backup team into that
small a space,” he replied, and, as she picked up the disc to look
at it more closely, “I’d have collected this lot in any event, but
now, with everything falling apart in my hands . . .”

“Things were falling apart before you got
here,” Jean told him, not that anything she could say would
convince him. She raised the glass and peered through it at the
clock, only to recoil at the distorted smear. “I thought this was
the lens from a flashlight, but it’s not.”

“It’s the magnifying lens from Wallace’s
telescope,” said Alasdair. “It fits the one in the lumber room a
treat. He was using it as a magnifying glass, I reckon.”

“Looking at what? What attracted him down
that ladder, knees and all? Something more than general curiosity,
surely.”

“One more fine, mystifying question. What do
you make of this?” He pressed his forefinger onto the bit of gold
and held it up.

Jean took his cool, dry hand and steadied it
before her face so she could focus on the dot. Except it wasn’t a
dot. It was a lilliputian gold star. Something very small, but
packing quite a punch, exploded in the pit of her stomach. “Good
God. That’s from Ciara’s earrings. You remember, she was wearing
them yesterday. They sounded like Santa Claus and his eight tiny
reindeer. I got a good look at them this afternoon—they’re cascades
of little gold stars.”

His hand went icy. He pulled it away,
replaced the star on its tissue bed, and covered the box.

“Alasdair, she owns the place, she’s been
living in Minty’s guest cottage all month, she’s in and out all the
time—heck, she and Wallace were working together, he drew the map
in her press kit.” She was babbling. She didn’t need to defend
Ciara, even though they were, in a way, sisters in arms. Sisters in
Alasdair’s arms.

He shook his head, whether rejecting her
words or his reaction to them she wasn’t going to try and guess.
“Ciara came here and things began happening. Starting with one of
Roddy’s dogs, likely poisoned, he was saying. Then Helen, Wallace,
the clarsach, the inscription.”

“Speaking of the clarsach, Hugh called this
afternoon. Thanks to Minty, his friend Dominic got it to the museum
in Edinburgh, where it’s under repair. Turns out it’s got a hidden
compartment with a scrap of paper inside that looks like a message
from the sixteenth century. They’ll need some techie hocus pocus to
get it unstuck and out of the hole, though.”

“Sixteenth-century cloak-and-dagger, eh?
Isabel as a secret agent? Not the first time a lady-in-waiting’s
been used in a royal plot.”

“Hugh jokes about arming people with musical
instruments, but I never thought he meant it literally. I’ve got
Michael on the case.”

“The case,” Alasdair repeated. “Delaney had a
report on Angus Rutherford as well. The man was seen at a pawn shop
in Peterborough on the Thursday. I told Gary we’d seen him here,
but Angus is still on his missing-persons list. If it was him with
Ciara this morning, he’s not yet found his way home.”

“He hasn’t yet found his way back to Minty,
at least. It sounds like he stays gone until his money runs out and
he has to pawn something. It’s an odd relationship, but . . . Well,
here, take a look at this while I get the food on the table. I
think I’ve figured out what Wallace was using his telescope
for—plotting occult sites. Maybe he was doing something with the
arrangement of the Border abbeys or prehistoric henges, but God
only knows what, and He’s not telling. ” She handed Alasdair the
folder and headed for the kitchen. She might not have much
appetite, but he had the lean and hungry look of someone who’d been
thinking too much.

Jean made sure Dougie had kibble and water,
then opened a box of crackers and dished out the soup. “By the way,
I bet that stone in the chapel with the name
Henricus
is a
memorial to Prince Henry Sinclair the Navigator. The one who might
have sailed to America a century before Columbus. It’s possible.
The Vikings sailed back and forth and Henry lived in Denmark for a
while and actually held Orkney from Norway, not Scotland.”

Alasdair’s gaze rolled from the map to the
ceiling. “Oh well now, that explains everything.”

“All the fringe history, legends, stories,
might explain
something
. One shape on that map is labeled
‘The Harp.’ Like the Ferniebank Clarsach, nudge nudge, wink wink?
The one piece of Isabel’s inscription that disappeared before the
dig and renovation was the harp.”

“How long’s this madness been going on,
then?” He jammed the papers back into the folder and pitched it
onto the desk, where it landed on Jean’s laptop.

“Since Gerald Rutherford? Since Isabel? Since
William Sinclair and the Templars?” When he didn’t answer she said,
“Soup’s on. Come and get it.”

He sat down and gazed as somberly into his
bowl as though he were an oracle looking for omens among the celery
slices and noodles.

Jean tried a simple yes-or-no question. “Have
you heard from Logan about Derek?”

“No.”

She could almost hear him thinking,
No
one’s reporting to me any more
. She couldn’t offer him any
comfort, so she offered him crackers. Food. Sublimation.

He said, “Come the morn, I’m looking about
for a postern gate.”

“A way of getting in that doesn’t involve the
gate and the gravel? I’ll help, if I can.”

“You can do, aye.” He spooned up a bite of
the soup.

It was okay. Not up to Minty’s standards,
presumably, but okay. Jean toyed with her portion and recapped the
luncheon—Shan, Valerie, Ciara, Minty’s recipes—as much for its
amusement value as for any possible clues, while Alasdair ate with
what even for him was less than good appetite.

“Valerie Trotter,” he repeated. “Hackit woman
with a head of short, bleached hair?”

“Worn-looking, you mean? That’s her. Did you
talk to her? What did she want?”

“She was asking me whether P and S would be
working security for Ciara, whether we were planning any more
digging before the handover, whether we were closing off the
dungeon, considering what happened to Wallace. No, no, and no was
all I could answer.”

“She’s listed in the book as a member of the
dig team back in the nineties. I guess she’s still interested.
Although she could have asked Ciara herself—she stopped and said a
couple of words to her outside Minty’s house, before our haggis
extravaganza lunch.”

Alasdair placed his spoon in his bowl and
touched his napkin to his lips. “Haggis.”

“The food wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Neither
was Ciara, to be honest.”

“Sounds like she was rabbiting on as usual.
Worse than usual, if that folder’s to be believed.”

“She isn’t letting the lack of facts stand in
the way of a good story, but who ever does? So she’s leaped onto
the secret-history bandwagon. She’s still got a feel for the
heritage business.”

An oscillation of his brows conceded that, if
reluctantly.

They stood side by side, washing and drying
the dishes. By the time Jean spread the dishtowel on its rack, the
night had fallen so silent she fancied she could hear Roddy’s cows
chewing their cuds. . . . No. All she heard was the
tick
tock
of the clock, an almost subliminal noise compared to the
resonant
clink chonk
of Minty’s grandfather clock, like
stones thrown down a well.

And then footsteps walked overhead. Jean
bowed over the kitchen cabinet, gelid unease oozing down her spine.
Alasdair stood stock-still in the center of the living room,
grimacing in something that wasn’t quite dyspepsia. Even Dougie sat
up and sniffed the air, as though he could smell something the
humans could not, and the fur on his back rose into a serrated
edge.

“So does the ghost walk down from the castle
to the chapel? That’s in the brochure, but . . .” Jean didn’t have
to describe what she was feeling to Alasdair.

Stiffly, he pulled the massive flashlight
from its holder. “Let’s have a look.”

She got a sweater from the bedroom, then
stepped out onto the porch at Alasdair’s side. Beyond the eerie
luminescence of the yard light, the night was dark and thick. Wisps
of mist curled up from the river and gathered among the trees. The
castle facade was a featureless cliff, sepia-toned, like an old
photograph—no, there again was that hint of a warm gleam in
Isabel’s window. But tonight the clouds were too low and dark to
reflect the glow of city lights.

Alasdair switched on the flashlight and swung
its beam around the courtyard, casting the old stones of the wall
into harsh relief, and then focused it on the path into the trees.
Several gnarled trunks sprang into definition. The shadows between
them were all the darker . . . No, there was a movement—Jean
tensed—it was the light glistening on a tendril of mist.

The uncanny was here, not there. That
all-too-familiar paranormal burden pressed down on Jean’s
shoulders. Ice prickled along her neck. Alasdair set his hand in
the small of her back, fingers spread, the one warm spot on her
body. She set her hand on his arm, hard as steel. He switched off
the flashlight.

A dim shape was forming near the path, a
slanting blur of luminescence, faint and pale, but with a human
figure inside it . . . There. The body solidified. Jean either saw
or sensed—or both—not a shroud but long skirts held in clenched
hands, a stiff bodice, a starched ruff, a feathered cap, a small
face looking back, grimacing so intently with—fear?
determination?—that the teeth flashed between stretched lips and
the eyes, nodes of darkness, focused far, far beyond the
surrounding walls.

The ghost crossed the courtyard swiftly but
in utter silence, trailing skirts fluttering, slippers rising and
falling several inches above the gravel, making a mad, headlong
dash for the entrance of the castle. Distantly, echoing through the
deeps of time, a door slammed, and all was still.

Just as Jean started to exhale, she saw
another light spring up, at the chapel, leaping and glinting like
fire—reflecting off that plastic plaque—and her exhalation reversed
into a gasp. “Do you see . . . ?”

Taking her hand, Alasdair switched on the
flashlight and pulled her forward onto the gravel.

She staggered, shaking off the
fourth-dimensional pressure field, and her feet crashed and
crushed. Then she was with him, moving quickly if not quietly
toward the path. Walter Scott’s words whirled through her mind,
nebulous and fragmented as clouds before a storm:
Seem’d all on
fire that chapel proud, where Roslin’s chiefs uncoffin’d lie,
blazed battlement and pinnet high, so still they blaze, when fate
is nigh, the lordly line of high St. Clair
. . .
What
fate
, she wondered,
whose fate, here, now?
Clasping
Alasdair’s large, steadfast hand, she ran into the shadows beneath
the trees and the mist trailed clammy kisses over her face.