Tears of the Jaguar (20 page)

Deborah flew Delta via Atlanta, where she had an hour and a half layover—not time enough to go by her apartment or the museum—and arrived in London at seven the following morning after fifteen hours of traveling. She had slept for perhaps three hours and felt fresher than she would have expected, but Gatwick was gray and daunting, a maze of long walkways and caustic officials who moved the crowds through passport control and customs like they were herding sheep. From there, she took the rail link into London Victoria, a packed underground train to Euston, then a Virgin train to Lancaster.

She arrived a little after lunchtime feeling drained and completely overwhelmed.

It was more than tiredness, of course. This wasn’t the first time she had made an impulsive journey to get to the heart of something she didn’t understand, but she felt curiously out of place, even more than she had in Mexico. Those places had
announced their foreignness in ways that made her oddly comfortable, separate—certainly—even alien, but unproblematically so. Here she just felt wrong. Everyone spoke English, but not her English. Their clothes were different, but not in ways you could pinpoint. The streets, the cars, the countryside: they all felt
off
somehow, as if the plane had brought her into a mirror universe where reality was tweaked out of the familiar. The one constant was that she still seemed to loom over every woman she met.

Maybe you should get a job in Sweden
, she thought.
Or Norway. Somewhere all the women make the volleyball team...

She munched on an egg salad sandwich and sighed as she peered at the bleak rain lashing the windows of the café she had chosen at random. At least her cell phone worked here without having to scale a log tower. After she finished her lunch, she called the Lancaster University local history journal, but this Hargreaves who had written the article on the gemstone wouldn’t be around for weeks.

“Summer break,” said the secretary, as if this should be obvious. “It’s when the faculty do their primary research. Since Professor Hargreaves is a local historian, of course, he might be in the area, but I don’t know. He sometimes volunteers at Lancaster Castle.”

“Volunteers as...”

“A guide,” she said. This time her tone spoke less of how self-evident this should be and more of her own bewildered disdain: walking tourists through castles was apparently beneath the dignity of a university professor.

Deborah shivered as she stepped out into the street. The English climate, even in summer, was about as far from Mexico as possible. She was going to have to buy not just a raincoat and
an umbrella, but a sweater or two and some jeans. It was surprisingly cold for late summer, it felt more like November. She was dressed—absurdly, she felt—in shorts and a safari shirt, like she’d stepped out of a Tarzan movie. It was hard enough to find pants that fit her in Atlanta. She had a feeling she’d never find a new pair in Lancaster. The town was bustling but seemed ancient and provincial, its streets winding and narrow. She pushed aside her worries about her odd outfit and hurried up what seemed to be the main road to the castle, wishing she had picked up an umbrella as the rain ran down her neck.

The flat cobbled approach bent up to a massive dark stone gatehouse, where two huge black doors reinforced with heavy bolted grid work loomed over her. They were firmly shut. Her heart sinking, Deborah gazed quickly around and found an incongruous bell button. She pushed it and stood there shivering and wet, waiting for someone to buzz her in like she was dropping by a friend’s apartment, rather than standing beside the arrow slits and portcullis of a medieval fortress.

Finally, she heard a clanking of metal and a smaller door opened up inside one of the larger ones, like a secret drawer popping open. A man in a navy-blue sweater that looked like a uniform peered at her.

“Yes?” he said.

“I thought the castle was open to visitors,” she said.

“It is,” he said.

“So...can I come in?”

“Not through ‘ere, love,” he said. “This is a prison, this is. You don’t want to come in here, especially not dressed like that. We’d have a riot on our hands. Castle entrance is round the back.
Just follow the walls round that way till you see the entrance sign.”

She thanked him, feeling stupid, and he said, “All right, love,” and shut the door.

She walked back into the rain and up between an ancient-looking church and the castle itself, the latter looming with a new solidity and purpose now that she knew it was a prison. It was a dour structure, dark and squat without the elegant whimsy of French or German castles, weathered by centuries and stained with pollution, but still serviceable like a wartime revolver: A building whose past bolstered its present grim purpose.

She found the open door with the entrance sign and the obligatory gift shop. Tours, she was told by the boy at the register—Barry, according to his name tag—went on the hour when everyone had assembled. She looked around. There was no one else there. Dr. Hargreaves, said the boy, slightly defensive, would be along in a moment if she’d care to browse.

She did, partly from curiosity about the building and its history, partly from a museum director’s impulse to compare notes. She considered books and pamphlets, plastic soldiers, key chains, and an abundance of toys and publications dealing with witchcraft. She was about to ask the kid at the desk about these when Dr. Hargreaves arrived.

He was a small, stooping, bald man who peered mole-like through gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore gray slacks and a conservative tie and jacket. He was a piece of history himself, she thought, a little slice of the nineteen fifties bustling about as if the world had never changed. Tiredness made her silly, and she grinned at him, so that he looked confused and embarrassed.

“Only one today,” said the boy to the professor, nodding significantly at where she loomed in case he might have missed her.

“Right,” said Hargreaves. “Well then. That’s all right.”

It didn’t seem entirely all right, Deborah thought. She seemed to unnerve the little man, which—given her safari attire—was hardly surprising. He blinked behind the lenses of his glasses.

“Step this way, please,” he said, and she noticed that his gruff, earthy accent belied his meek demeanor. “Now, first off, I’ve got to say for legal reasons that a lot of the castle is still a working court and a prison, which means no photographs. There are closed-circuit cameras everywhere, so you will be caught if you try it. The penalty for violating that particular law is two years in prison, which you probably wouldn’t like very much.”

He smiled suddenly, revealing the bleak understatement as a kind of joke, and she smiled back, taken off guard, and liking him for it.

“The earliest surviving parts of the castle are Norman,” said Hargreaves as he led her through, “the keep being built around 1150, but there was a Roman fort on this site a thousand year earlier. The gate house at the front of the building—the main prison entrance—did you see it?”

“I did. I rang the bell,” said Deborah ruefully.

“Did you, by God?” said Hargreaves, amused. “They won’t have liked that. You’re lucky you made it round to me. Go in the front door and who knows when you’d have made it out. Anyway, the gatehouse was built in the first decade or so of the fifteenth century by ‘enry the Fourth, the first king of England who was also duke of Lancaster as the present queen is today.”

Hargreaves, so mousy and nondescript when he was silent, became a character as he spoke, his guttural Lancashire accent
with its broad, flat vowels crisply bitten off, stretching his face. She had to listen carefully to catch every word but she liked the sound, which was not remotely like the stereotypical restraint she thought of as English. It made her think of Nick Reese, and she frowned, wondering how she was going to turn the castle tour into something productive.

“Mr. Hargreaves?” she said without preamble as they moved through a great stone arch and down a narrow corridor, “did you write an article about a small gemstone found somewhere close by?”

The color of blood and tears...

The little man, who had been addressing some aspect of the castle’s role in the English Civil War, stopped midsentence and turned abruptly to her, his eyes bright with suspicion.

“Seems you have the advantage of me, Miss...?”

“Miller,” she said promptly, extending her hand. “Deborah Miller.”

He took her hand and shook it, but his eyes held hers.

“Frank ‘argreaves,” he said. “So you’re not just here for the tour,” he said, pronouncing the last word
too-er
.

“Not just the tour, no,” she conceded. She gave him a wry “got me” smile, knowing but not apologetic. “I’m an archaeologist,” she said. “I found a similar stone and wanted to find out as much as I could about yours.”

“Where did you find yours?” he demanded.

“Mexico,” she said.

“Mexico?” he echoed. His looked baffled and repeated the word. “
Mexico
. What makes you think your stone was related to the one found here?”

“The mineralogical signature,” she answered. “They were unusual stones.”

“Aye,” he said, turning and leading her through a door. “They were that.”

“I was wondering if I could see the stone you found so that I might compare it...”

He gave a snort of derisive laughter.

“Nothing to see,” he said. “It’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Not to Mexico,” he said, another half joke, “but maybe not so far from there.”

“The States?”

“It was bought by a private collector for more than the owners could refuse, though the precise figure was undisclosed.”

He said it bitterly, like it still left an aftertaste.

“And that was legal?” she asked.

“There was no reason to suggest any great historical significance, and the gem was—in a manner of speaking—unremarkable.”

“In a manner of speaking?”

“It was certainly unusual. Very clear for a colored stone—flawless is the best word. When you held it up to your eye it changed the texture of the whole world. The sky went pale red.”

He mimed the action, finger and thumb up to his glasses as if he still had the stone.

“Beautiful thing,” he said, snapping back to her. “But without the depth of color prized in rubies, so not especially valuable.
Curious
, the jeweler called it, even unique, but not worth much. The bloke who owned the land nearly gave it to the castle for nothing. Then he gets this offer, from America—or so
the rumor went—and that’s the last anyone sees of it. The land where it was found has changed hands since then and it seems the gem did too. Whoever bought it first sold it on, quietly, supposedly to some collector.”

“Of gems?”

“Of occult objects.”

“Occult objects?” Deborah repeated. “Meaning what?”

“Oh, you know,” said Hargreaves with a dismissive gesture. “Magic crystals. Bunch of New Age rubbish.”

“Why would anyone think it was magic?” she said, almost stumbling on the absurdity of the last word.

He shrugged.

“People with more money than sense,” he said. “Who knows what goes on in their heads. And now you’ve got one. A magic gemstone, I mean. Or have you?”

He fixed her with that look of his again, and she flushed.

“Actually,” she said, “it’s been stolen.”

“Has it indeed?” he said, giving his half-joking smile again. “Isn’t that interesting? Now, if you’ll step this way, I’ll show you the Shire Hall.”

For a moment Deborah just stood there, watching the man, but then she saw what was in the next room, and she strode quickly after him, her heart in her mouth.

James closed his eyes against the sun, pushed his toes into the sand, and sipped from his piña colada. It was perfect and served exactly how he liked it, the rum and pineapple served in an actual coconut with the top sliced off. The coconut was green, which surprised him, and didn’t taste quite as—well, not quite as
coconutty
—as he had figured it would, but it was perfect all the same. The waves were crashing rhythmically on the white beach, and right next to him, wearing this little bikini with perky yellow and green penguins on it, was Alice, pale as the sand and pinking on her back and shoulders. Soon he’d offer to rub some sunscreen on her and she would lazily agree, like it was no big deal—him touching her in that weirdly intimate but public way, massaging the cream into her rose tattoo with the barbed-wire thorns—and he would smile and sip from his drink and wait to see what happened when the sun went down. Considering where they had
been a couple of days before, thought James, pushing his glasses up his nose, things had worked out pretty well.