The Burning Glass (16 page)

Wondering just what Ciara and Keith planned
to do with it—turn it into a hot tub?—she backed out of the grotto
and looked over the far edge of the terrace, to a relatively flat
field overgrown with nettles, thistles, loosestrife, willowherb,
foxglove, and other leafy unnamables. Butterflies wafted about. A
path or two meandered between barely visible tumbles of worked
stone—the remains of the hospice, no doubt. Usually monastery
buildings were south of the church, to catch the sun, but there
were exceptions. Ferniebank was obviously one of them, the plan of
the structure dictated by the site of the ancient well and the lay
of the land along the river.

Like the castle, the derelict chapel grounds
were romantic, in the Shelley-Keats-Byron sense of the word.
Picturesque. Something to spark a bittersweet sigh just before tea
time, so the cuppa and the scone would go down all the better.

As for the chapel itself . . . Jean looked
around. Wordlessly, Alasdair gestured toward the roughly truncated
walls. These pinnacled buttresses were less assertive than
Rosslyn’s, but were still lavishly sculpted with dragons and other
less fantastic animals. Jean headed toward the round-headed doorway
but was diverted by a freestanding informational plaque the size of
her office desktop and helpfully tilted at a forty-five-degree
angle.

Like the flat, the plaque was not new. Its
plastic cover was warped, the message beneath faded by the sun and
stained by leaking rain. But a quick and dirty history of
Ferniebank was legible enough, names and dates and Isabel’s story
illustrated by a drawing of the keep with smoke flowing from an
upper window while appropriately garbed people gesticulated below.
Other drawings—both more skilled and more generic than
Wallace’s—showed the chapel under reconstruction and hooded monks
offering medicinal brews to reclining and no doubt declining
patients.

Another ray of sun glanced through the
clouds, reflecting off the surface of the plastic so brightly that
Jean winced. Ah, this was the rippling glint of light she’d seen
from the bedroom window yesterday afternoon, thinking at first it
was a fire. From her angle it had seemed to come from inside the
chapel. She’d seen the plaque reflecting headlights last night,
too.

Jean stepped through the doorway. The
interior of the chapel wasn’t much larger than the castle’s High
Hall and was paved with lichen-mortared flagstones. A double line
of pillars, four to a side, led toward the empty chancel. They were
wrapped with stone tendrils that looked as though they had grown up
out of the earth and then petrified. The broken bits of vaulting at
their tops were frenzies of ornament: fruit, leaves, flowers, human
figures and faces—some with skin attached and some as bones—stars,
musical instruments including several harps, and multitudes of
protruding geometrical shapes like stony vertebrae. More botanical
garlands encrusted the window frames.

Her breath escaped in a whistle. No photo
she’d seen, and certainly not her distant inspection from the
window, had fully revealed the glories of Ferniebank Chapel. Oh
yes, the carvings were in the same style, perhaps from the same
hands, as those at the much better known Rosslyn. How sad that
these were worn and stained by dripping water and splotched with
yellow, white, and black fungus.

“Supposedly,” said Alasdair at her side,
“you’ve got the Seven Deadly Sins, the signs of the zodiac, an
entire family of green men, who knows what all. Interpretation’s at
your own risk.”

Jean looked up at the sky, or what she could
see of it between clouds. “I’d sure like to have seen the ceiling.
Arches, vaults, pendant bosses—the works, right?”

“There are drawings in the book, Gerald’s and
earlier ones as well.”

“The roof didn’t collapse until the 1890s,
right? Never mind religion, reform, depopulation, whatever—if it
hadn’t lasted that long, most of these sculptures would have wasted
away long since.” Jean imagined the interior of the chapel as it
had once been, in the light of candles, the dark gray stone
gleaming, the carvings such intricate patterns of light and shadow
that they would have seemed to move. They would have seemed to
worship. “You have to wonder what was going on in William Saint
Clair’s mind. Or the minds of his masons, more accurately. This
sort of over-the-top decoration was unique in Scotland even before
the Reformation, let alone after. And neither Ferniebank nor
Rosslyn was destroyed by the Protestants.”

“Giving ammunition to the conspiracy
mongers,” Alasdair said.

“Yeah.” Jean looked back over her shoulder.
The severe top of the castle rose above the trees, a typical border
keep, matter-of-fact, dour, and doughty at once. Masculine to the
chapel’s femininity.

Alasdair was walking toward the chancel,
where the building narrowed into a square extension, the holy of
holies. Jean picked her way respectfully among the various
commemorative stones that marked the graves of the movers and
shakers of their times, and paused beside one set into the wall
beside the sumptuously carved but harshly decapitated arch
separating the two parts of the building. The inscription was
almost illegible.
“Henricus Sinncler,”
she read aloud.
“Chip, smudge,
naut
, chip,
adi
e, another chip, and
MCD
. That’s 1400. But that was before this chapel was
rebuilt, wasn’t it? Was this particular Henry left over from the
earlier building? A relative deserving a memorial stone? ”

Silence, except for the wind in the trees and
the murmur of flowing water. Jean walked on through the archway.
Alasdair was standing straight and still as a prehistoric monolith.
“Alasdair?”

“It’s gone,” he said, each word a hailstone
shattering on the pavement below.

“What?” She looked down at the tips of his
shoes, pointing toward a rectangular slab of a different color and
texture than the surrounding flagstones, its edges hinting at a
rosy blush despite its age. But the central part of its surface was
a raw red the color of dried blood, scored with parallel ridges,
sharp and unweathered. Jean felt the certainty fall through her
chest and into her stomach like a rock into a well. “This is
Isabel’s gravestone?”

“It was. The inscription’s been chiseled
clean away, and all the bits gathered up. It’s not been vandalized,
it’s been stolen.”

Erupting with an emphatic “Damn and blast!”
Alasdair lunged for the door.

No!
Jean stumbled, found her feet, and
sprinted behind him as he double-timed it out of the chapel, over
the terrace, up the path.
No!
The antiquity violated, and
Alasdair too—he’d barely been here for twenty-four hours—it wasn’t
fair!

Someone could have taken the inscription at
any time during the ten days when Ferniebank had no caretaker, but
no, the thieves came last night. Was that coincidence, too? There
were too damn many coincidences.

And she stumbled again, the second certainty
punching her in the gut. She thought she’d seen lights last night,
and she hadn’t told him.

He catapulted into the courtyard, headed for
the flat—P.C. Logan and yet another APB, you get the clarsach back
and you lose the inscription—a harp was one thing, a stone jigsaw
puzzle was another . . . Jean ran out of the trees and stopped dead
beside her car.

The Mystic Scotland van was idling outside
the gate. The courtesy gate—now it was Ciara who was turning a key
in its lock and pushing it open. Jean looked around at Alasdair. He
had halted so abruptly the gravel banked up around his feet.
Not
fair, they’re piling on!

Ciara climbed back into the van, drove it
into the courtyard, stopped. The doors opened and half a dozen
tourists decanted themselves and raised their cameras. What, Jean
asked herself, had she been thinking about a three-ring circus?

Ciara was still sitting in the van, talking
to a man wearing a cloth cap, its small bill low over brushy
eyebrows. As if sensing Jean’s gaze on him, he glanced around.
Through the reflections of light and shadow on the window, like
glints from a disco ball, she saw muddy eyes set close together in
a long, almost convex face that flared outward along the jaw. His
skin was such a pasty white that his emergent moustache, little
more than fuzz gone to seed, looked like a smear of dirt between
lengthy nose and lipless mouth.

Dismissing Jean, he leaned toward Ciara as
though making some plea. After a long, frozen moment, Ciara laughed
in his face. If that wasn’t an up-yours rejection of his statement,
albeit delivered in Ciara’s own unique way, Jean had never seen
one.

The woman leaped from the van. The man exited
the vehicle much more slowly, almost tripping himself up on the
doorframe and landing on the gravel with a thud. “The castle’s not
yet open for business,” Alasdair called, his stance that of a
fighter poised to break from his corner.

Ciara aimed a flounce at him, a gesture made
more effective by her billowing skirt and pink fun-fur jacket. Her
matching pink lips turned up in something that was neither a smile
nor a snarl. “Give it a rest, Alasdair. Even you cannot say I’m
bending the rules.”

“Away with you then, and good luck to you if
you’re expecting to see Isabel’s gravestone.” Alasdair pivoted and
strode on toward the flat.

Ciara brushed by Jean, her face puckered with
puzzlement, not resentment. Jean knew her own poker face fell
woefully short of Alasdair’s professional version, but she gave it
her best.

The erstwhile Mrs. Cameron—or did she ever
take his name?—herded her flock onto the path. Her tall, lanky
companion shambled along behind, his tweed country-squire suit and
tie standing out from the casual windbreakers and jeans of the
others. Jean would have found the contrast amusing, if she’d had an
amused bone in her body just then.

“. . . chapel sculptures are pagan, occult,
and alchemical, marking the azimuths of sacred sites throughout
Europe which were erected atop ancient Druidic holy places,” Ciara
was telling her acolytes. “Ferniebank’s playing as significant a
role in the underground stream of knowledge as Rosslyn, well-known
for its ancient secrets—Grail legends and Templar mysteries.
Remember now, Marie of Guise, Mary Queen of Scots’ mother, wrote to
Lord William Saint Clair vowing eternal gratitude for his showing
her the great secret at Rosslyn. And Isabel Sinclair here at
Ferniebank played the ancient clarsach for Queen Mary, therefore .
. .” Ciara’s voice faded away.

Therefore two and two make seventeen
,
Jean finished for her. Although Ciara’s mathematical abilities were
not the issue, not when she was successfully running a business,
whether it was founded on moonshine or not. No, the issue was
standing on the front porch of the flat, one hand grasping the
railing so hard his knuckles were stark white.

As Jean mounted the steps beside him, she
sensed his laser-like gaze skimming her shoulder, aimed at the
now-empty path. His flash of anger was buried so deeply under that
polar ice-cap he could don at will, she couldn’t believe he’d
actually grinned, even laughed, such a short time ago, let alone .
. . Well, what could she expect? Of course he’d default to the same
Alasdair she’d first met.

What she did expect was for him to say again
that Ciara had caused some changes here, but he didn’t. He didn’t
say anything. He opened the door and stood aside while Jean stepped
into the flat. Then he shut the door behind them both and headed
for his official P and S envelope. He was going to have to tell
them about the theft, that it happened on his watch, that he hadn’t
heard or seen a thing. Some caretaker he was. Some chief of
security.

Jean slumped against the kitchen cabinet,
feeling every bit as boneless as Dougie, who was still in his
chair, sleeping the sleep of the virtuous.

If she didn’t tell Alasdair, if she just kept
her mouth shut, would that be the equivalent of lying to him? He
needed all the evidence he could get that, yes, something was wrong
here, badly wrong, whether anyone had died because of it or not.
And yet she didn’t have any evidence to offer, not really.

Get it over with
. “Alasdair, I thought
I saw something near the chapel last night. I thought I saw lights,
maybe. But when I took a good look, I didn’t see a thing. So I
decided I was wrong. And the lights I saw later on, I’m sure they
were headlights from the road across the river.”

He put the envelope back down. He turned
toward her. “You saw something? Lights? When?”

“When I went outside to lock my car. And
later on, in the bedroom window, from the corner of my eye, just
for a second.”

“You didn’t tell me.” His voice was flat as
road kill.

“But I didn’t actually see anything. If I
had, I’d have told you, and you’d have gone out and searched up and
down and . . .” She was just making it worse by sounding
possessive.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It never occurred to me. You said yourself
we had a bit of an appetite last night.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I didn’t think I saw anything!”

“That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?”

Oh yes, the same cold, crisp, take-charge,
arrogant Alasdair she’d first met. “Don’t talk to me like I’m some
wet-behind-the-ears detective constable.”

“Even the rawest recruit would have known to
make a report. And I’d have told you that you cannot see headlamps
from the road across the river, because it runs behind the
hill.”

Shit
. She’d thought she’d seen an ice
sheet covering his expression. She was wrong. His face was cold as
an alien moon cut by frigid crevasses opening onto . . . Not onto
nothingness. It was only because she knew him so well, after all,
that she could see the disappointment flickering in those depths,
disappointment and anger and even, horribly, fear.