The Silver Bough (5 page)

“I’ll be in my office if you need me,” she said as she passed the counter.

“I’ll ring if the crowds get too much for me to handle alone.”

As she stepped out into the foyer again, hearing the loud echo of the steady drip of water into the bucket, she became aware of how cold it was, and shivered unhappily at the thought of the long winter drawing in. The library was a great place to work in the summer, always cool on the hottest days, but she did wonder how much use the antiquated storage heaters would be in combating an extended cold spell, especially with winter gales blowing off the sea and howling in the eaves.

Her office was also the staff room, a narrow room at the end of the shorter leg of the L-shaped building, most of that space occupied by the reference library and local collection. She went breezing through, expecting it to be empty, and was brought up short by the sight of a man working at one of the tables, surrounded by piles of books and papers.

Graeme Walker looked up as she approached, blinked owlishly, and grinned. “You look like you’ve just seen the library ghost.”

“What ghost? No, don’t tell me. I don’t need anything else making me nervous when the wind howls.” She spoke lightly; despite the age and size of the building, she found it a friendly, almost cozy space and had never imagined it could be haunted. “You startled me; I thought I was alone. I’m surprised you came out in this weather.”

“Neither wind, nor sleet, nor hail, nor—how does it go?”

“I don’t know; you’re the postman. But you can’t call this your appointed round?”

“A labor of love,” he conceded, cocking his head to one side and regarding the notebook page before him, half-filled with his scratchy writing. “And I’m on a new trail now.”

“This is your history of Appleton?”

“Yep. Only right now I’m into the time before it was Appleton, before it was a town. What you might call the prehistoric past. Except not what’s
generally
known as prehistory, because Appleton was founded in the seventeenth century, so I’m talking about the late Middle Ages. And what I’m finding—well, it’s major. It could change the way we think about all kinds of things if I’m right; you would not believe!”

Almost certainly not, she thought, careful not to show her dismay. She’d liked Graeme from the moment she’d met him. He was a chatty, charming, intelligent, largely self-taught Glaswegian who had come to Appleton about fifteen years ago for a holiday and stayed on after falling in love with a local girl. When he’d told her he was researching local history with a view to writing a book, she’d thought that it sounded like a good idea. She hoped he wasn’t turning into a crank; she’d met quite a few of them over the years, pursuing some mad theory or other, and his latest remarks set off a warning bell in her mind.

“Say, do you have a few minutes? Sit down, and I’ll tell you about it.” He got up; she put out her hand to forestall him pulling out another chair.

“Sorry, but we’re closing in fifteen.”

“It’s a quarter to five already? Jings!” He capped his pen and bent over the table, sorting through the papers and books scattered there. “I’m supposed to meet Shona and the kids at the bus stop—Shona’s wee cousin’s meant to be on that bus, come all the way from America!” He closed his notebook and thrust it with a bundle of papers into a shabby canvas briefcase. “I lost all track of time. Lucky it’s only a five-minute walk to the bus stop from here. Now, this book is from the main part of the library, but these others were off the shelves around here.”

“It’s all right, Graeme, just leave them on the table; I’ll put them back.”

“Ye sure?”

“Of course.”

“Aye, and you’ll put them all back in the right places, whereas I might not.” He grinned like a mischievous boy.

She didn’t contradict him, although the truth was she was still learning her way around the local collection. In the main library, the system of classification and shelving was perfectly standard, but back here many of the books had been filed according to a different plan, the key to which she suspected had gone with the late Mr. Dean to his grave.

“Or you could just leave the books on the table to use again tomorrow,” she said.

“
If
I get in tomorrow. Family obligations at the weekends, you know.” Then he perked up again. “Although, if Ashley wants a tour guide—well, I’d have to bring her here, wouldn’t I? I mean, this is the finest building in the town. I remember my first visit after I’d met Shona and she got Miss McClusky to take us upstairs.”

She frowned. “Miss McClusky? I thought you came to Appleton fifteen years ago.”

“Yeah, that’d be about right.”

“Mr. Dean was in charge by then.” She thought of Miss Ina McClusky—a spry old bird, certainly, and still an enthusiastic talker and reader, but now well into her eighties. “Miss McClusky was long past retirement age.”

“Oh, aye,” he said, nodding vigorously. “She was, but she came back to work part-time—retirement didn’t suit her, and she missed this place. So she used to help out. Mr. Dean was in charge. Mr. Dean-from-Aberdeen. I never got on with that man. He was such an old stick-in-the-mud, and he took all the most interesting things out of the museum, because, according to him, they ‘weren’t appropriate’—he meant, not connected with
his
view of Appleton’s history—or they weren’t ‘educational’—meaning they didn’t teach the lessons he wanted taught.” He leaned confidingly toward her. “So he put all that stuff away in storage, where it’s just waiting to be rediscovered. There’s forgotten treasures in there that really ought to be on view. He ruined a unique, small museum, made it bland and ordinary. It’s a shame.”

She nodded sympathetically. Although she couldn’t judge whether Mr. Dean’s long-ago changes had been toward improvement or ruin, she knew nothing else had been done in twenty years, and thought it a crying shame that such a potentially important resource was so neglected. “The museum should have a curator,” she said. “Even if I had the right professional qualifications, I don’t have time to do anything about it. There’s no budget for it.”

“You don’t have to tell
me.
I’ve tried to nobble my local representative, but he’s just not interested. Funny thing, but he thinks money for education and health care is that much more important! Ah, well.” He sighed and pulled over the biggest book on the table. “May I take this one out? Or is it still for reference only?”

She picked it up.
The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain, Vol. 2,
published in 1897, and seemingly never issued. “Well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t take it home with you. I don’t suppose anyone else will come in needing to use it. But how is this part of your research? Surely there aren’t any volcanoes around here?”

“Under the sea there are. Did you know that the geology of the Appleton peninsula is
completely different
from the rest of Scotland’s? There’s nothing else like it anywhere in Britain, or the European mainland.”

“Really?”

“Closest match is the other side of the world—the New World, where you came from. And I’m thinking there could have been some volcanic action under the sea that gave rise to a new island, long after the rest of Scotland was formed.”

“But Appleton isn’t an island.”

“It almost is. We’re only linked to the mainland by a narrow little strip—barely half a mile wide. You know those rocks there by the side of the road?”

She remembered the final tight, high bend in the road between the sea and the rocky hills just before the descent into the gentler farmland around the town, and she didn’t have to ask what rocks he meant. They inevitably snagged the eye, rising like weird, jagged towers at the edge of the sea.

“Don’t they look like fallout from some major geological event? Land erupting out of the sea, or sheared off one landmass and sent crashing against another?”

“They are pretty dramatic,” she said noncommittally, glancing at her watch.

“And another thing: The Gaelic name for Appleton is
Innis Ubhall.
That doesn’t mean Apple
Town,
it means Apple Island, and by all accounts it’s what the folks from round about all called this area well before the Earl of Argyll got his Royal Charter and imported a load of Lowland farmers to bring civilization, aka loyalty to the crown, to these wild parts.”

As soon as he paused for breath she jumped in. “Why don’t I stamp this out for you. Did you want anything else?”

“That’ll do for now.” He followed her as far as the fire exit, where an old map of Scotland had been hung, before he stopped and called her back. “Here, look at this, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

She looked with him at the pink-and-blue patchwork of land and sea that made up the west coast. Appleton had been built on a plumply rounded spur of land at the very end of a long, skinny peninsula; the frequent description of it as an apple hanging from a branch was as apt as it was inevitable.

Appleton was old enough by American standards, but relatively new in European terms. It was one of several new towns founded in the seventeenth century in Scotland, settled by incomers—mostly English-speaking Lowland Scots who brought their loyalty to the British throne with them into the wild and troublesome Highlands. Before then, although the area must certainly have been occupied by someone, there had been not so much as a named village.

“What’s the date of this map?” Graeme asked.

“Eighteen sixty-five, I think.”

“There are older maps of Scotland. Do you know about Timothy Pont?”

“Oh, yes.” She’d boned up on Scottish history at the same time as she’d applied for this job. “His maps are wonderful. Amazingly accurate for the time—the 1590s, wasn’t it?—and he was the first to map all of Scotland. He traveled absolutely everywhere.” She stopped and frowned at the map in front of her, recalling her disappointment when she’d checked out the brilliant, searchable Web site where she’d first seen Pont’s maps and discovered he’d missed out the Appleton peninsula. “At least, that was the general idea. Obviously, he missed a few places.”

“No. He came to this part of the coast, and he mapped it in his usual accurate way—but Appleton wasn’t there.”

“Well, but Appleton
wasn’t
here. Not for a few more decades yet.”

“I don’t mean the town. I mean the apple itself is missing.
Innis Ubhall.
This whole chunk of land.” Graeme traced the distinctive curve of coastland with his fingertip. “It’s just not there on his map. Not in the Joan Blaeu atlas of 1654, either.”

It was not hard, looking at the small “stem” of land that connected the apple to the mainland, to imagine an earthquake or underwater eruption that might cause it to break away, turning Appleton into an island, but it was harder to conceive of it happening the other way around, to imagine an island forcibly pushed against the mainland and made to grow there, like a grafted branch. Did such things even happen? Mistakes made by a couple of early mapmakers were far more likely.

“Interesting,” she said neutrally, turning away from the map. It was not her job to attempt to debunk anybody’s pet theory, no matter how wild. She accompanied Graeme to the circulation desk, feeling, as she sometimes did, like a keeper at a very genteel loony bin.

“You found the secret room yet?” he asked, pausing in the foyer to look back at her.

She saw the mischief in his eyes. “I guess Miss McClusky showed it to you?”

He laughed. “No, she didn’t include it on the tour. But if it exists, I’ll bet you she’s seen it! Shona says the story is that the architect designed this building with a hidden room, a room without a door, to keep his daughter safe.”

“Safe?”

“She was crazy. She ran off, came back with an illegitimate son, then a few years later she killed herself—or else it was an accident—or maybe she was rescued at the brink of death, her mind gone. Some said she ended her days in a hidden room in the library—maybe inside the dome.”

“The dome is purely decorative; there’s no way to get inside it.” She knew she sounded pedantic, because she’d said it so often. It was amazing how many times she’d heard the question.

“
I
know that. But there must be a space underneath: the original room without a door. Of course, if Alexander Wall
did
create a special, hidden room for his daughter, he must have been psychic, to know she’d grow up crazy, because she’d only just been born when he designed it.”

His eyes were glittering now, making Kathleen think of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. “I’d give a lot to read his journal—it ought to be in the local collection. It’s listed in the card catalogue, but I can’t find it. I think that Mr. Dean took it off the open shelves and hid it away. It’s not right, you know; it was left to the public library, and it belongs to the people.” He gave her an affronted glare, and had the air of a man winding himself up for a good, long rant.

Unhand me, grey-beard loon,
she thought, glancing at her watch. “I don’t want to rush you, Graeme, but it’s four minutes to five. If you’re meeting someone off the bus…”

He let out a comical yelp and slapped himself on the forehead. “Late again! Thanks. Look, I’d really like to have a word with you about Wall’s journal…”

“Of course. Anytime.”

She watched him pull up his hood, tuck his briefcase securely under one arm, then dash, shoulders hunched and head down, through the front door, out into the pouring rain. Then she went back to the counter, where Miranda was counting up the day’s issue and entering the total in the big red ledger.