The Bagpiper’s Ghost (2 page)

The cobblestone path opened onto the road called Burial Brae and then onto the main street, and soon Jennifer was striding along. It almost seemed that by putting distance between herself and Peter and the dog, she could pretend she didn't know them. She even began to hum as she walked.

But at the first light, they caught up with her, still arguing.

Jennifer rounded on them both.

“Shut up or get away from me,” she snarled. “Far away.” She was sure her face was as fiery red as her hair.

They fell quiet at once, almost as if silenced by a spell.

Of course, she knew no such silencing spells. As Gran would say, magic takes a lot longer to learn than six rainy vacation days in Scotland.

But, obviously, sometimes a snarl can serve just as well
, she thought grimly.

The light changed, and Jennifer and Peter looked carefully both ways for oncoming cars. Magic gone awry was not the only danger here. Traffic in all of Great Britain drove on the left side of the street, not the right. Mom had drummed and drummed that into them. For their safety, they needed to check both lanes before crossing, even though they were teens and not Molly's age.

The road was clear in both directions. Jennifer bounded across, and Peter followed, yanking the dog along behind. No sooner were they all on the other side than boy and dog were at it again.

“Ye have a hard hand, laddie. Be careful I dinna bite it off.”

“There's always muzzles, dog breath.”

Jennifer turned and said very quietly to her brother, “Peter, only someone who's got magic will even have a clue that the dog can talk. But everyone else will certainly wonder why you're holding such a one-sided conversation. So will you
kindly
please shut up.” She glared at him. “You're embarrassing me.”

Peter closed his mouth. His lips made a sharp, thin line, like a long dash in the middle of a sentence.

The dog, however, gnashed his teeth and growled, “Wee, timorous, sleekit, cowerin beastie,” under his breath. He was caught up short when Peter gave his leash an awful yank.

“I'll
coward
you, you snot rag …”

After that, they were both silent.

And away from that trembling silence, Jennifer stalked stiff-legged, followed closely by her twin and the dog.

None of them said another word until ten minutes later, when they were in sight of Fairburn Castle, an impressive stone ruin with a couple of standing towers, and below ground, the remnants of a repulsive dungeon in the shape of an old bottle.

The dog spoke a careful, quiet sentence. “Do ye ken it's haunted?”

“What's haunted?” Jennifer asked.

Peter remained sullenly silent.

“The castle, ye doited lass,” the dog began, before Peter yanked the leash again.

The dog growled, and a local woman and her two children stared at Peter.

He stared back.

Kneeling, Jennifer loosened the leash, and the dog grinned his toothy, slobbery grin at her.

“Aw, Jen …” Peter began.

“It obviously hurts him,” Jennifer said. “And someone's likely to arrest you for animal abuse. They take that sort of thing very seriously here.”

“Right on,” the dog said in his bad imitation of an American accent. Then he gave Jennifer a long, slow, aggravating slosh across her lips with his tongue, laughing as she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth in disgust.

“Obviously it didn't hurt him enough,” Peter grumbled.

Paying no attention to Peter's grumble or the dog's laugh, Jennifer stood and said, “You are
both
impossible.”

“We only aim to please, Jen,” Peter said, and winked at the dog, who—strangely enough—winked back.

“You … you …” Jennifer began.

“She likes us, dog,” Peter said.

“She likes me better,” the dog added.

“Does not.”

Jennifer put her hands on her hips and leaned down till she was nose to nose with the dog. “You said a haunting. What … is … doing … the … haunting?” She separated each word in the careful way one talks to a child or a foreigner.

The dog turned his head and began scratching under his chin with a back leg. It was an insulting sort of scratch. He kept it up for a very long time.

“He doesn't know,” Peter said. “He's made it up.”

“He does know,” said Jennifer.

“Doesn't.”

“Does.”

“Doesn't.”

Another woman, with a redheaded child in tow, glared at them.

This time it was Jennifer who glared back.

“Before ye start up on World War Three,” the dog said, his scratching over, “I'll tell ye what haunts Fairburn Castle, if ye like.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “We like.”

Peter nodded. “So speak, dog.”

The dog's face got a sly look, and he shut his eyes.

Peter and Jennifer knelt, one on each side of him.

“Please,” they said, one after another. “Please.”

The dog's eyes snapped open. “Put that way, how can a bodie resist?” He grinned toothily. “The ghost's a lady in white. White dress, white hat with a veil, white gloves, and a white face, too. She bairges aboot the graveyard behind the ruins as if she's at some fancy-dress garden party, and not moldering in her grave.”

They turned to him together.

“Have you—” Jennifer began.

“Seen her?” Peter finished.

Then they smiled at each other.

Still twins, then
, Jennifer thought, enormously pleased.

Three

Castle

“Of course, I've seen her, that paidling maiden,” said the dog. “Any
true
Scot can see her. And any other ghost. But if yer an Englishman or a villain—or a Campbell, of course—ye canna even get a glimpse.” He shook his head, which made his ears flop.

Peter laughed. “Ah well, we're not English and we're not Campbells …”

“Or villains,” Jennifer added.

Peter nodded.

“So …” Jennifer said carefully, “will
we
be able to see her?”

The dog shook his head from side to side again, ears flapping like wings.

“Pretty please?” Jennifer added.

The dog cocked his head to one side. “Not now, ye gormless lass.”

The more the dog put her off, the more Jennifer suddenly wanted to see the Lady in White. “Why not now?”

Peter put out a cautionary hand. “Jen …”

But something—
Maybe something magic
, she thought—compelled her to ask again. “Well, why not?”

The dog grinned, as if in on some great joke. “Because it's daytime, ye coof.”

“And ghosts don't come out in the sunlight,” Peter added for good measure. “Only at night.”

“Weel, of course at night. Dinna ye ken that she's a ghost, lassie?”

“We're not allowed to go out by ourselves at night,” Jennifer said. “Not even at home.”

“
Especially
not at home,” Peter said.

The dog's toothy grin grew wide. His great pink tongue lolled out of his mouth like a dare.

“We could
sneak
out, I suppose,” Peter said slowly.

“Peter!” Jennifer's voice registered shock. It was such an un-Peter thing to suggest. But she'd already thought the same thing.

Twins do.

“Tonight,” they both breathed together.

“Good, then that's settled,” the dog said, and began sniffing the curb, where other dogs clearly had been before him.

They let him do his business, then Peter pulled at the leash again, hauling the dog away from further investigations on the sidewalk or in the road.

“Come on,” Peter said. “Let's check out the graveyard.”

“For what?” the dog asked. “It's daylight, ye daftie.”

Jennifer understood what Peter meant and—as usual—tried to explain it. “We need to see everything. Get the lay of the land. Figure out where all the stuff is.” Her hands described large circles in the air. “For tonight.”

The dog sat on his haunches, refusing to move. “Stuff?”

“Gravestones,” Jennifer explained patiently.

“Pathways,” Peter added.

“Bolt-holes, ye mean,” the dog said. “Yer looking for escape routes. Hah!” He made a strange sound through his nose. “Ye scared wee bawties. Rabbits. Conies. That's what ye be. I had the right o' it before. Cowards, as the boy says.”

Peter put his hands on his hips and leaned over, speaking fiercely and directly into the dog's uplifted ear. “If we're going to come out here—sneak out here—in the middle of the night, dog, we're going to be prepared, understand? We're not entirely stupid, you know.”

“Aye. Not
entirely
,” the dog admitted.

“Or entirely powerless,” Peter added.

“I'm counting on it,” said the dog.

“What do you mean by that?” Jennifer demanded. “What do you know about this ghost that you're not telling?”

The dog snapped his jaws shut and shook his head, ears slapping madly at his nose. And though they begged and pleaded and finally threatened him, the dog stayed dumb.

So they made their way through the wrought-iron gates and into the castle graveyard without any help or advice or even any teasing from the dog, which—Jennifer thought—certainly made for a happy change.

The graveyard was very old, and scattered throughout with lichen-covered, rough gray stones from the sixteenth century on. Some of these stones stood upright, as if defying the weather; others tilted, as if they'd been defeated by the wind and by the years. And a few—thick and scarred—lay completely flat on the ground, as if they were the tops of casket lids.

In between the stones, what grass there was had been worn down by visitors until it was the same color as the soil.

A small church nestled amid the graves, its own stones a muted gray-and-yellow, the colors dulled even more by moss and lichen. Most of the stones in the church were deeply fissured by long weathering and the centuries, but a few of them seemed to have a different kind of covering, which stood in stark contrast to the rest.

When Jennifer remarked on this, the dog grunted, sounding remarkably like a pig.

“Harling,” he said. “Harling protects the soft stane.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Peter. “Mr. Know-It-All-Tell-It-Ever.” It was one of his mother's favorite phrases.

“One of my masters was a stonemason,” the dog answered carefully, then went dumb again.

“One
of your masters? How many have you had?” Jennifer asked.

“Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor,” the dog offered, his tail beating in rhythm.

“And wizard,” Peter reminded him. “Michael Scot was your master, too. Till Jennifer fixed that.”

The dog's tail stopped wagging.

The most recent gravestone they found was dated 1927 and said simply
LOST AT SEA
.

“So no one is buried there,” Jennifer said.

“Duh” Peter replied.

Jennifer felt her face go hot. Peter never teased like that. Even at home, surrounded by his friends, he always defended her. Once he had said that was what brothers were supposed to do.

Some brother you are now
, she thought.

The dog smirked but refrained from comment.

Thankful for the dog's silence, Jennifer turned back to the gravestones. She found a name she recognized.

“Look, Peter—James Kirk, Captain, HMS
Bountiful
.”

“So the great man was a sea captain long before he led the
Enterprise
!” Peter commented. “Wonder if the
Star Trek
crew knew that he died in …”—he checked out the date, which had almost been erased by time—“1774.”

Jennifer smiled a little at his joke, and peace was restored between them.

As if challenged by Jennifer's find, Peter began to scramble around the gravestones until he found some names they both thought downright silly: Zenobia McManners, Miracle Morrison, and Anache Dunrobin.

“Imagine going to school with them,” Jennifer said. “They'd probably beg for nicknames.”

“Zenny, Mirc, and Ana.” Peter laughed.

“Anache is a boy's name,” the dog put in dryly.

Right then the town-hall clock in the next street over rang out noon so loudly, Jennifer had to stick her fingers in her ears.

The dog suddenly jumped onto one of the horizontal tombstones, sat up on his haunches, and began to howl, a sound so full of pain it made Jennifer want to howl as well.

The dog's howling went on and on until the last bell died away. Then he jumped down and tugged at the leash, pulling Peter toward the east gate and home.

Peter tried to hold him back, but the dog—as if goaded by a hot iron poker—wouldn't stop. Peter had to either go with him or let him off the leash. “Jen—” Peter began to say, but she wasn't paying any attention. So, shrugging, Peter gave in and he raced away with the dog.

For a moment Jennifer wondered if the dog's sensitive ears had been hurt by the bells. But he had never complained before, and they had wandered through town when the clock had struck at other times. It was a puzzle.

Then, at the dying fall of the last bell, she thought she heard something else. Something very much like the long final note of a bagpipe, that low skirl of sound that comes as the pipes wheeze into silence.

She looked around but saw no one with pipes nearby, though, of course, she knew that bagpipes could be heard yards and yards—even acres and acres—away.
The Devil's horn
, Da called bagpipes. He didn't like them much.

Her eyes swept across the horizontal tombstone the dog had just vacated. Besides a name with the dates of birth and death, there was a poem inscribed on the gray stone. She read the inscription:

MARY MACFADDEN, GONE TO GOD
,

MARRIED ONLY TO THE SOD
.