The Burning Glass (20 page)

What she couldn’t remember was the rest of
the song. She didn’t really want to, since it was a song of
parting, but looking it up on the internet was something to do.
Casting a sharp look at the answering machine, she set her laptop
on the desk and hijacked the telephone line.

Ah, yes. The song was written by a Sinclair
from Caithness, the lowlands beyond the Highlands, the rolling
green county at the northeastern peak of Britain with its steep
sea-girt cliffs overlooking Orkney. One branch of the Sinclairs was
connected with the Borders and Rosslyn, the other with Caithness
and Orkney, although it was hard to tell the players without a
program. A Henry from Rosslyn had fought with Bruce at Bannockburn.
One from Orkney and Rosslyn both had supposedly sailed to America,
with the evidence being stylized ears of corn—or as they called it
here, maize—carved around a window frame at Rosslyn. Jean, who had
grown up picking corn kernels out of her teeth, thought the
carvings looked as much like maize as she looked like Marilyn
Monroe.

But there was definitely a stone in the
chapel wall here at Ferniebank inscribed
Henricus
, Henry.
The
adie
could be
Orcadie
, Latin for Orkney, and the
naut
probably was
nauta
, navigator. Maybe that was a
memorial to the sailor Henry, who had died about 1400, perhaps even
in America. The William who built Rosslyn and rebuilt Ferniebank
was that Henry’s grandson, after all.
Cool!

While she had the connection, she checked her
e-mail, then surfed to her favorite discussion group at The One
Ring.Net, which had, as its banner phrased it, served Middle-Earth
since the First Age and was the haunt of Tolkien geeks of the
darkest dye. For a while she was lost in the erudite essays and
clever jokes. Then she realized she was tying up the phone line and
disconnected. Constable Logan or Inspector Delaney might try to get
through to this number rather than to Alasdair’s cell phone.

Speaking of her partner, sparring or
otherwise, maybe she should make a cup of tea and take it out to
him, as a, well, a detente offering. Jean stood up and looked out
of the window just as Alasdair emerged from the shop, sipping a
canned drink. Okay, he was self-sufficient, she got the idea. She
was self-sufficient, too, darn it. With her own interests and her
own work. She picked up the Ancient Monuments book from the
windowsill and leafed through it.
Great Scot
readers enjoyed
archaeology articles. She could use the story of Isabel, the Gray
Lady, as a hook.

The book opened with a note of appreciation
to Angus and Araminta Rutherford and Wallace Rutherford, and
mentioned Gerald Rutherford’s amateur excavations of 1912. No
surprise there. Gentleman—and sometimes lady—archaeologists had
left their fingerprints all over British antiquity, for better and
for worse.

The next page listed the participants in the
chapel dig, among them Valerie Trotter, in her student, prematernal
days, no doubt. The head of the dig had been one Donald McSporran,
an elderly, more tolerated than respected, faculty member at the
University of St. Andrews—or so Jean remembered from writing his
obituary soon after she arrived in Scotland. She turned to the body
of the book.

As usual, Alasdair was right. The text was
heavy going, consisting of blocks of fine print cut with tables of
arcana such as pollen analysis and the chemical composition of
plaster and paint. The drawings, while exquisitely detailed, were
of pottery shards and masonry details, not the sort of thing that
would wow a mass audience. . . . Aha—a photo of the chapel stripped
of its flooring to reveal the honeycomb of crypts beneath was
titillatingly macabre, with chalky bits of bone peeking out from
collapsed coffins. Jean saw no armored skeletons, although there
was a close-up of one that had been hacked and sliced by various
bladed weapons. That, she thought with a shudder, was what Mary’s
secretary Riccio looked like. The illustration was helpfully
labeled “Plate 5.”

She was squinting at the diminutive columns
of the index when the electronic notes of “Ode to Joy” made her
jump.

Closing the book and leaving it on the coffee
table, she pulled her phone out of her bag.
Hugh Munro
. All
right! A dose of sanity! “Hi Hugh,” she said.

“Hullo, Jean,” Hugh replied, his voice
underlaid by snatches of melody played on a keyboard and the wail
and squawk of inflating bagpipes. “We’re on stage in half a sec,
but I knew you’d want to hear the latest turn-up in the adventure
of the clarsach, as conveyed by my pal Dominic.”

“He’s the musical instrument expert, right?
Oh yes, please. Minty said she was having it, well, conveyed to
Edinburgh.”

“She did that, a first-class seat for Dominic
and one for the harp. He went along to the conservator’s lab, and
you’ll never guess what they found.”

“My capacity for wild guesses is a little
strained right now.”

With a sympathetic chuckle, Hugh said, “Many
clarsachs had cavities in the post at the back—traveling minstrels
kept a change of clothes tucked away inside. But this one has a
small hole inside the front brace, hidden beneath a bittie carving.
Inside’s a scrap of paper that looks to be sixteenth century, with
an ink mark or two. But it’s stuck fast. They’ll need all their
dental picks and whatnot to remove and read what’s on it.”

“Sixteenth century? A time of grand confusion
and conflict, with the Reformation drawing blood, and Mary Stuart
escaping to England, and Isabel’s family supporting her, and the
Borders a war zone—just the sort of setting for secret messages,
right?”

“Folk were always carrying musical
instruments to and fro, a smuggler’s delight . . . Coming! Must
run, Jean, sorry.”

“Thanks for letting me know. Break a
fing—er—good luck with the show.”

Whoa, she thought. Had the harp-thief
dismantled it looking for the message? Did he find it? Had he
pulled out most of it and left a scrap behind? How did he know to
look for it? And who was
he
—or
she
—anyway? Plopping
herself down in the desk chair, Jean punched the Campbell-Reid’s
cell phone number.

Michael answered, “Reiver’s Rest, Villain’s
Villa, Thieve’s, erm, ah . . . Never mind. You have news for us
about the inscription, Jean?”

“Not the inscription, the clarsach, which is
in Edinburgh already.” Her words falling over each other, Jean
explained the situation and concluded, “Could you call up the
museum and find out what’s going on with the paper scrap?”

“Try and stop me. The documents boffins will
be dancing a springle-ring!” As the connection evaporated, Jean
heard Michael calling, “Eh! Rebecca! You’ll never . . .”

Jean put her phone down and stared blankly at
the clock on the desk. The harp could be—would be—repaired, but the
fingers that had played it, that had tucked a secret message inside
it, were forever lost.

At least when it came to writing articles
about Ferniebank she was spoiled for choice. She opened both her
word-processing program and the folder labeled, “Ferniebank
Conference and Healing Centre. Getting in Touch with the Secret
Wisdom of the Past.”

As she’d dimly noted earlier, Keith and Ciara
had resisted the temptation to indulge in stunt architecture. The
white-painted and slate-roofed building designed to sit above the
river both evoked and simplified traditional style. The ruins of
the chapel would be the centerpiece of a sort of cloister garden.
The new structure didn’t even carve out much landscape, since the
landscape itself was marketable. The castle, though, would retain
only enough of its structural members and architectural features to
allude to that quality beloved of advertisers, authenticity. Would
that deprive the ghost of her haunt, or would she still walk, for
those who had eyes to see and hearts to know?

Jean pulled out a brochure advertising
Cookery at the Glebe, including sample menus and recipes. Another
piece of paper was folded in quarters—ah, a map of the Borders,
with an arrow pointing to Ferniebank and . . .
Oh good
grief
. Ciara wasn’t just waltzing with history, she was
break-dancing with it.

Lines were superimposed on the map the way
lines were superimposed on Wallace’s drawing of the gravestone.
Except here the lines joined dots indicating towns and other sites
into triangles, spears, and crescents, with cryptic notations such
as “The Rose Line” and “The Harp.” In other words, Ciara was
trading on the—theory, notion, illusion—of sacred geometry, the
exceedingly creative concept that human-built locations were
arranged in patterns of occult significance. The fact that in an
area as densely and lengthily populated as Western Europe you could
find enough sites to draw Mickey Mouse mattered not to the true
believer. Secret wisdom was very much in the eye of the
beholder.

Jean started to fold the map but was stopped
by the words at the bottom: “Courtesy of W.B. Rutherford.” Again
Wallace . . . That’s what he was doing on the roof with the
telescope, plotting sites as well as stargazing. Had he breathed in
so much mold and mildew at Ferniebank he’d completely lost track of
the dividing line between fact and fiction?

No. That wasn’t fair. The
Orkney-Rosslyn-Ferniebank nexus had some perfectly genuine plot
points. Or points to be plotted, as the case might be. As for the
Templars and harps carrying secret messages, well, it was all
highly entertaining, the same way making constellations out of the
random distribution of stars was entertaining. Wallace and Ciara’s
great minds thought alike, it seemed. What had Ciara said about her
confederate? A shame Wallace will not be here to see the final
designs?
Or the final profits
, Jean amended. Angus and Minty
would see them, though.

Miranda would get a kick out of all this. And
it was time to check in with her anyway, before events got
completely out of hand. Although, with the return of not only the
clarsach but also Angus, officially or otherwise, the inscription
was the only identifiable crime. Everything else was innuendo at
best. Or at worst. Jean picked up her phone.

And reached Miranda’s voice mail. It was
either tea time or happy hour in Edinburgh. Jean dutifully left a
message. “Hi, it’s me, reporting in. Minty’s luncheon was something
else again, lots of dishes made from, wait for it, haggis. Pretty
good, though. And in more serious news, an important grave
inscription’s been stolen from the chapel. Yes, an inscription,
chiseled out and carried away. No, Alasdair’s not happy. You’ve
heard that the Ferniebank Clarsach’s been recovered, I bet, with
more news to come. And . . .” She grimaced. No help for it. “Brace
yourself for this one. It turns out that Ciara Macquarrie is
Alasdair’s ex-wife. But everything’s okay. Enjoy the Tattoo or
wherever you are tonight, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Wondering if her tone had been much too
cheerful, even careless—not that tone necessarily came across on
the telephone—Jean pushed “end.” But in neither public nor personal
matters should she be spilling her guts.
Figuratively
, she
told her gurgling stomach.

The small clock on the desk read 5:45. She
made a cup of ginger tea, and drank it while looking out of the
front window. The day was darkening, she saw, as the clouds swelled
and thickened. Cars came and went. People roamed around. Alasdair
walked a group to the castle doorway and another to the chapel
path, no doubt explaining about the unfortunate incident of the
inscription, and let that be a lesson to us on the protection of
historical and cultural resources. Most of the time he was out of
sight in the shop.

Jean pressed her nose to the glass. That
scrawny, blond, crew-cut woman heading down to the chapel had to be
Valerie Trotter, braving whatever she meant by Isabel’s curse.
What? Had Logan given her and Derek such a hard time she wanted to
check out the scene of the crime for herself? Again—she’d been on
the excavation team.

The phone on the desk blurted a double beep.
By the time Jean had her hand on the receiver, she realized it
wasn’t going to ring again. Alasdair must have picked up the
extension in the shop. She hoped it was good news, something that
would cool the anger and fear she’d seen bubbling up from his
underground magma pools . . . Time had already done that. And guilt
as well, probably, about snapping at her as much as about losing
the inscription.

A small plate dusted with crumbs indicated
that he had had lunch. She could go ahead and cook something for
dinner, then, something that did not involve beaks and black
feathers but did involve fowl. Chicken soup. That was supposed to
be good for what ailed you.

Jean found her painfully assembled recipes
and starting slicing and dicing vegetables, very carefully, for the
knife was dull. Minty would have been horrified—not that Polly
hadn’t proved that you could slice yourself just fine with a sharp
knife. A tickle at her ankle was Dougie, roused from his nap by the
smell of cooking chicken.
Yeah, to a dog you’re part of the
family. To a cat, you’re staff
. Jean forked over a shred or
two.

By the time she started the pot simmering, it
was past six-thirty. The clouds were now thick gray roils like
bales of wool, blocking the sunlight and sucking the color out of
the landscape. Turning on the lights in the living room, she added
a row of stitches to the sweater she was knitting for Alasdair
while the raucous laugh track of an American sitcom tried to
bludgeon her into believing that a couple insulting each other was
funny.

At last it was seven-thirty. Jean hiked up
the burner beneath the pot of soup and set the table. Then, taking
a deep breath, she stepped out into the premature dusk.