The Burning Glass (47 page)

Minty didn’t move, didn’t blink.

“You didn’t know about the jewelry, did you,
until Angus came home with it? It bought you your cooking school,
something you deserved after all your hard work. But Wallace and
Ciara, they made trouble for you. A shame you got Angus instead of
Ciara. That was Noel’s fault, wasn’t it? These people are so
distressingly incompetent.”

“Yes, they are.” Minty’s alabaster complexion
was flushing an unbecoming shade of magenta. She scrutinized the
drawing of Valerie holding the chest and flipped it over to
consider the inventory. A tiny nod, the briefest bob of her head,
told Jean that Val’s listing of the jewelry had been spot-on.

“You’ll go after Valerie next, won’t you? You
should have eliminated her years ago, but she went away. And now
she’s back, insulting you, humiliating you. She deserves a dose of
foxglove.”

“Yes.” Minty wadded the drawing and threw it
down. She weighed the envelope, set it on the box, then looked up
at Jean. Her eyes were glowing coals. “You want your money, is that
it?”

Jean stepped back. If she had learned
anything from Alasdair, it was to beware drilling beneath an ice
cap. Deeply buried under Minty’s layers of frost and polish was,
indeed, a molten core.

Jean balanced on the balls of her feet, ready
to dodge. “You had the castle renovated and opened. You took the
jewelry. Like James III at Roxburgh, you’ve been blown up by your
own cannon. Is that why you didn’t want Isabel’s burning-glass,
because it’s a mirror and if you look into it you’ll see who’s
really to blame?”

“Very clever,” said Minty between clenched
teeth. Her right hand inched toward the open top of her
handbag.

“Or should I draw the comparison with another
monarch? Did you look at Valerie Trotter, did you hear Angus and
Wallace talking about her, did you see them sending her and Derek
gifts?”
Breathe
, Jean told herself, and bent her knees. “Did
you ever say, in the words of Elizabeth about her cousin Mary, ‘she
is lighter of a healthy son, but I am barren stock’?”

“Damn you to hell.”

Not many people, Jean thought, could say that
without plastering several exclamation points onto the end.

Minty’s manicured fingers plunged into her
bag. From it she whipped out a knife, a carving knife, a long
pointed blade gleaming in the uncertain light as though with
witchfire. Throwing the bag down, she leaped.

Jean leaped as well, not particularly anxious
to see if Blackhall’s vest would turn six inches of doubtless
high-quality and well-honed steel. Emitting a deliberate
scream—
okay! now!
—she dodged to the side and toward the
door.

Instead of coming straight for her, Minty
spun around to block the door. Her face, Jean noted with part of
her mind, was perfectly calm except for the eruption in her eyes.
The other part of Jean’s mind was palpitating, looking for an
escape route—footsteps thundered down the staircase and blows
smashed against the front door . . .

Minty lunged toward her, knife raised.

Jean sprang for the staircase, slipped on the
dusty, uneven treads, told herself that at least she was wearing
athletic shoes—Minty’s boots must be slowing her down. Amazing how
fast she could get her muscles to flex despite the extra weight of
the armor, with a deadly weapon in a conscienceless hand just
behind her.

She had passed the second floor and was
heading for the third before she realized she hadn’t met any police
heading down. Great, wonderful, glorious, they’d come down the main
staircase and she was heading up the secondary one.

Shouts echoed through the building,
Alasdair’s voice lifted in something incomprehensible. For all she
knew it was the Cameron war cry.

Not the cap house, she couldn’t let herself
get trapped in the cap house, with no way out but the parapet. Jean
catapulted into a shadowed room on the dark side of the building,
twelve panes of wavy window glass admitting only a ghostly gray
light. Isabel’s room.

Door. Shut the door
.

She spun, seized the knob, pushed. Twine was
holding the door open. Knotted twine.

Where was Minty? Had she lost track of her
quarry in the upper reaches of the building, confused by echoes? No
such luck. The floorboards of the hall were groaning to stealthy
steps. The woman wasn’t breathing heavily. She didn’t seem to be
breathing at all.

Jean ripped off her backpack, tore open the
zipper, dumped everything onto the floor. Her phone went spinning
away, its read-out bright as a candle flame. The box, glass lens,
glass mirror. She rapped it against the cold, sooty hearth of the
fireplace and it broke in her hand, cutting the mound at the base
of her thumb with a pain that felt like searing heat. Blood welled,
ran down to her wrist, caught in the fibers of Alasdair’s
sweater.

With the shard of glass she slashed at the
twine. It gave. The door started to slide shut, as though pushed by
invisible hands. She threw her weight against it and slammed it
just as Minty hit the other side, first with a solid thump and then
with repeated blows.

A bolt. There was a bolt. In a desperate
spasm of strength, Jean freed the rusty metal rod and jammed it
into the catch. She leaped backward so fast she tripped over her
bag and crashed down onto her rump, jarring every bone in her
body.

A knife blade worked its way between the
panels of the door and moved back and forth like a metal tongue.
Light. A rosy light was growing in the room, and the air was heavy,
crushing her against the planks of the floor.

Footsteps. Voices. A scream of anguish, short
and sharp. Jean could hear it vibrating in her ears, on and on,
even after the leaden air no longer carried the sound. She heard
the clump of heavy feet, blows against the door, a breath gasping
in terror that wasn’t her breath at all. She saw red flame spurt
suddenly on the hearth and long skirts whisking past her face, and
smoke rising, gray, and dense.

Male voices shouted. The door held. The flame
died down. The air lifted. And the skirts, the bodice, the little
cap, the oval face with its large eyes, all thinned into mist and
evaporated.

Jean sat on the floor alone, but not in
silence. Again she heard blows against the door, this time not
mailed fists but bare hands. A familiar voice called her name,
“Jean! Jean!”

She crawled to her feet, tottered to the
door, and released the bolt.

Large, cool hands seized her. Strong arms
pressed her against a chest, broad and firm. “We’ve got her,”
Alasdair said into her ear, and above her head, loudly, “Bring the
medical kit.”

She was trembling, shudders of hot then cold
then hot running from crown to toe. Still she managed to look past
the crevasses in Alasdair’s face to the corridor, where the
darkness was now stitched with the lightning bolts of flashlight
beams.

Linklater and Blackhall held Minty between
them, stiff as stone. One strand of hair dangled down beside her
face, its skin gone so pale it was faintly green. Her eyes stared
ahead, not at Jean but past her, as though she watched the
foundations of Ferniebank crack and crumble and the sheer sides
collapse. Then Delaney, wheezing, holding the knife, stepped
forward and intoned, “Araminta Rutherford, I arrest you . . .” And
she was gone.

“Only you,” said Alasdair, his breath warm
against Jean’s ear, “would use historical metaphors to push someone
over the edge.”

“I didn’t,” she croaked, and tried again.
“Elizabeth said Mary was lighter of a
fair
son, but Derek’s
just not . . .” Kallinikos wrapped her hand in gauze, his touch
gentle, his expression offering no comments. Her hands were red
from blood and from the rusty bolt.
Caught red-handed
.

She wobbled, but Alasdair held her steady.
Kallinikos collected her things and put them back in her bag, then
considered the shards of sepia glass littering the floor. “Is that
the burning-glass?”

“Yes. No. It was,” said Jean. “That’s seven
years bad luck, isn’t it?”

“No,” Alasdair stated.

Kallinikos gingerly collected the bits into
the cardboard box, tucked it, too, into her bag, then hung the bag
over her shoulder. Between them, the men got Jean back down the
spiral staircase, whose steps had contracted and lumpified in the
last—how long had it been since she ran up them, fear lending not
only wings but stabilizers to her feet?

Delaney waited in the Laigh Hall, holding the
crumpled sketch and envelope. Logan stood at his side, his obsidian
chips of eyes darting right and left, saying, “Minty’s the killer?
How . . . Well now, I’m supposing she’s properly a Maitland, not a
Rutherford at all.”

Delaney’s stubby fingers shooed Logan away.
His thick glasses turned toward Jean and Alasdair. His chest
swelled. “Well, now.”

From far above fell a ripple of harp strings,
a descending arpeggio, as though the harper was tuning his
instrument—or playing a farewell. Jean and Alasdair glanced so
sharply up they almost knocked heads. But the notes faded into
infinity. And Jean thought,
the harp. The harp key.

The only heaviness she felt was that of the
bulletproof camisole, the only chill that of the air in the Laigh
Hall. Delaney’s voice, rising and falling like one of Logan’s bees,
rabbited on about Minty—not exactly a confession, charges, enough
to be going on with.

Jean seized her scuttling thought and hung on
for dear life. “The harp is the key,” she said, interrupting
Delaney. “Harp marks the spot.”

He stopped in mid-phrase, mouth hanging open.
Poor little lady
, his expression said,
we’ve asked too
much of her, she needs tea and cold compresses
.

Alasdair, though . . . His brows began their
roller coaster imitation.

“Get this thing off of me.” Handing Delaney
her bag, Jean pulled the sweater over her head and gave it to
Alasdair. Kallinikos stepped forward and helped him remove the
vest, leaving her standing in a slightly damp T-shirt that should
by rights have been chilled but which she suspected was steaming in
the cool air. Retrieving her backpack, she fished out a hairbrush
and dumped the bag on the floor. “Open the door to the dungeon.
Give me that torch.”

Alasdair pulled open the trap. Kallinikos
handed over his flashlight. Jean shone the light into the pit.
Dust, dirt, stones—nothing had changed. Nothing except her own
perceptions, broken into shards like the glass but more easily
reassembled. “We thought the harp jewelry was long gone. We thought
the piece of the inscription engraved with the harp was long gone.
But Wallace noticed that the inscription is in a reddish sandstone,
not the local gray whinstone.”

“And so,” said Alasdair, “he got himself into
the dungeon with a piece of the inscription for comparison and a
magnifying glass, the better to see the contrast.”

“Because of something Gerald said, probably.
As an amateur archaeologist, he would never neglect a dungeon.”

Delaney folded his arms and with a beseeching
roll of his eyes asked, “What the hell are you on about now?”

“Exhibit P,” Alasdair told him. “The genuine
Exhibit P, not what Minty was thinking it was. Likely not what
Ciara’s thinking it is. Third time’s the charm.”

“Here. Hold the flashlight.” Jean crammed the
hairbrush into her jeans pocket. Turning around, she slipped her
feet over the edge, felt for and found the rungs of the ladder, and
started down. Cold air prickled through her shirt. Musty, still
air. The walls squatted close by, but seemed as stable and steady
as Alasdair’s grasp.

She strained upwards to take the flashlight
from Kallinikos while Alasdair clambered down the ladder. Freeman’s
face appeared in the opening, then his hand helpfully directed a
second beam of light into the depths. Somewhere in the background,
Delaney grumbled a monolog.

“So where’d Gerald put it then?” Alasdair
asked.

“The crazy uncle, archaeologist, poet,
jeweler—he had an attic and he had a cellar, too.” Jean crept along
the walls, using her hairbrush to sweep away the dust, fine as ash.
There, a small irregularly shaped reddish block was wedged between
larger, if just as irregular, gray ones. She knelt down and brushed
delicately at it.

Alasdair crouched beside her, shoulder to
shoulder. “Aye, that’s red sandstone. He must have enlarged a
drainhole, or prised out a smaller stone. And what’s this?” The
nail of his forefinger scraped at the edge of the rock. “This looks
to be plaster of paris, not mortar.”

“Who’s got a penknife?” Jean called toward
the opening. A small opening, in a low roof.
Just few more
moments
, she told the panic squirming in her gut.

Kallinikos climbed partway down the ladder to
hand Jean a penknife. She opened it—the tiny blade was a miniature
of Minty’s, a silver fang in the narrow light—and handed it to
Alasdair.

His touch meticulous, he scraped away the
bits of plaster, wedged the blade into the resulting crevice, and
pried. The rock moved. Jean’s small fingers grasped a corner. She
pulled. And the piece of stone came loose, adding rosy dust to the
shades and textures of red already on her hands.

She turned the stone over and wiped it
against her shirt. The hidden side was engraved with a harp. The
Ferniebank Clarsach. Silently she held the piece up for Freeman and
Kallinikos and, she saw, Delaney, his round face hovering behind
theirs like a stray moon.

Alasdair was now using the penknife to probe
inside the hole. “There we are,” he said, and extracted a box about
the same size as the cardboard one holding the remnants of the
glass. But this box was metal and oblong, a diminutive lead-lined
coffin.