The Burning Glass (7 page)

Across the stone-punctured and foam-frilled
surface of the Teviot stood a belt of trees, the green of their
leaves lightly brushed with gold. Beyond them rose a hillside
streaked with the purplish-pink of a few late foxgloves. The
misshapen shadow of the castle stretched toward the east, where it
lay across the water of the river damping its sparkle.

Jean opened the window and leaned out. To her
left, beyond the gray flank of the castle and the back of the
outbuilding, stood St. Mary’s chapel. Its roofless walls were
pierced with arched windows and carved with the weathered shapes of
fruits, foliage, human and demonic figures. It rested upon a small
rocky prominence that might be either a natural outcrop or a
manmade terrace, one that blended into a low-walled courtyard that
disappeared in turn into the forested hillside. There a grotto of
the same time-stained gray stone marked the site of the ancient
holy well. It might have originally been dedicated to the goddesses
Kerridwen or Coventina, making the attribution to Mary a simple
matter of policy change.

The chapel rose phoenix-like, not from flame
but from the stony bones of the earth and the eternal rush of
water. No, there was a fire. Or a rippling glint of light behind
the broken tracery of a window. Something was reflecting a low
sunbeam through the leaves.

Ciara and Keith ambled around the side of the
chapel to the terrace. She was burdened by no more than her woven
shoulder bag, but he was holding an electronic gadget, probably a
camera. He aimed it at the grotto, trying various angles, and fired
away.

Ciara considered several plants, collected a
flower or two, and gazed over the railing protecting the tumbled
slope where one end of the terrace had subsided into the river. Her
attitude was that of Juliet on her balcony, gracefully baying at
the moon. But Jean doubted if she was declaiming, “Wherefore art
thou Cameron?” Maybe she was pondering bottling the well-water,
labeling it with a Celtic-interlace logo, and endorsing it with
Mary or some other saint’s name. That would bring a fine old
medieval custom into the modern marketplace.

Even as Jean looked, the sun sank below the
western hills and the shadow of Ferniebank melted away into the
dusk. Exhaling through pursed lips, she headed back into the living
room.

Her suitcase was sitting beside Dougie’s
cage, and bags of groceries lined the kitchen counter. Alasdair’s
footsteps crunched across the gravel, coming back with another
load. This time when he stepped inside, he closed the door behind
him, with a solid thunk that evoked bolts thrown and drawbridges
raised. At least now, Jean thought, I’m hunkered down inside the
castle with him instead of standing on the other side of the moat,
watching him run his standard up and his guns out. Aren’t I?

Alasdair deposited her knitting bag and
laptop case beside the desk. “That’s the lot. Your car needs
locking, but I’ve not got the keys.”

“You think Stanelaw’s mini crime wave will
get to us out here?” she asked, not entirely joking.

“Hard to say,” he said, with a quick frown
that conveyed nothing humorous at all. He bent over Dougie’s cage
and released the latch. “There you are, laddie. Make yourself to
home.”

The little gray cat poured himself out
through the opening and sat down to wash his face, signaling his
utter boredom with his new surroundings. Alasdair can be every bit
as cool, Jean thought, although he isn’t as given to posturing.

“The hall cupboard’s large enough for his
litter box.” Alasdair gestured toward a narrow door opposite the
bathroom. “You’re not thinking of putting him out the night, are
you now?”

“No way. Hector and Jackie from across the
road might decide to welcome him to the neighborhood. The Elliots
live over there, right?”

“Just Roddy Elliot. Cantankerous old chap.
Lost his wife, Helen, at the beginning of the month, I’m hearing.
His daughter Polly’s married to Noel Brimberry at the Granite
Cross.”

“I met Noel earlier this afternoon. His
daughter Zoe is helping Michael and Rebecca with the B&B. They
told me about Helen Elliot. Small town, Stanelaw. Everyone’s
interconnected.”

“Oh aye. Everyone’s interconnected, bugger it
all anyway.” The faintest of wry crinkles turned up one corner of
Alasdair’s mouth.

There it was, a quick spark like a candle lit
behind a frost-covered window. He was trying, wasn’t he? In both
meanings of the word.

Jean wrapped her arms around his chest. For a
moment he stood unyielding in her embrace, too too solid flesh.
Then with a subtle but perceptible shift he softened, just a bit,
and returned her embrace. “Ah, don’t mind me,” he said. “We’ll
manage well enough.”

She liked hearing that we, even though she
had to wonder at his choice of words. He’d been lowering his
expectations, too. Fair enough. She rested her head against his
shoulder—he was of less than imposing stature himself, and they fit
nicely. Standing up, anyway.

Dougie made a figure eight around their legs,
then trotted off toward the closest windowsill. Alasdair vented a
dust-dry chuckle which ruffled the hair above Jean’s ear, and said,
“We’ve things to put away. And a dinner to cook, I reckon.”

Reluctantly, Jean subtracted herself from the
embrace. She’d never expected him to indulge in gratuitous fits of
billing and cooing, and in that she hadn’t been disappointed. Doing
him the courtesy of remaining silent, she went to work sorting
things into the refrigerator and various cupboards, discovering a
good supply of food and drink already there, including some aging
spices and condiments that must have been Wallace’s.

As in any good holiday home, there were
plenty of dishes and cooking implements. Not that this is a holiday
home, Jean thought as she shoved aside a stack of plastic
foodkeepers. The odd vase or print suggested attempts at interior
decorating, but the bric-a-brac was neutral, detached, and the
place looked a bit bare. Wallace’s personal effects had been
cleared away.

Especially from the bedroom, where Jean found
Alasdair’s clothing folded in the dresser drawers or hanging to
attention in the wardrobe, including his kilt and its appurtenances
swaddled in a garment bag. The clothes were arranged on one side,
just as his toiletries occupied only one shelf of three in the
bathroom, leaving room for her things. She hoped Alasdair wasn’t as
meticulous in his personal habits as he was in his intellectual
ones. It would be like living with a drill sergeant and his white
gloves.

But then, he’d seen her fidgeting around her
apartment, card-cataloguing her books and washing his coffee cup
almost before it left his hands, and was probably worrying that
she’d climb into bed beside him and whip out a clipboard with a
pre-flight checklist.

If both of them found it necessary to have
command over their environments, did that hint at underlying and
possibly troublesome control issues . . . Good grief, Jean told
herself as she started back to the front room, you’re focusing so
tightly on all of this you’re magnifying gnats into dinosaurs. You
sure weren’t indulging in this sort of analysis before your
wedding.

And herself murmured in reply, this time you
know what you’re getting into.

In the hallway, Alasdair was emptying a bag
of cat litter into Dougie’s box. Just as he’d estimated, it fit
into one end of a misshapen closet, two feet deep and probably six
feet long, that must have originally been a chamber or even a
chimney in the original castle wall but now contained a water
heater and cleaning supplies.

Dougie himself was stretched out on the
windowsill like a miniature sphinx. Jean draped the blanket from
his basket across the hollowed seat of an old easy chair, one that
wasn’t going to bring any second looks on
Antiques Roadshow
.
“So,” she said, and her voice seemed like a shout in the silence.
She reminded herself that it only seemed silent because she was
used to living in the city.

Alasdair left the door of the cupboard ajar.
“So?”

“How long did Wallace Rutherford live here?
Was all this stuff his? There aren’t any personal effects lying
around—no reading glasses, no toothbrushes, no monogrammed
mugs.”

“He moved house here when the castle was
opened, so aye, I’m supposing the furnishings were his.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“I spoke to him on the phone the day before
he died is all. He said he was just after having a look at the
roof. He knew the place inside and out, I reckon. ”

“Did climbing up to the roof—what is it, five
flights up?—bring on his heart attack?”

“There’s four flights from the ground floor
to the cap house and a ladder down to the dungeon.”

“Where Wallace was found.”

“Oh aye. Where he was found.” There was that
quick frown again, not a full-fledged scowl of suspicion, just a
pucker of skepticism along the top of Alasdair’s brows. Policemen
were skeptical. It came with the territory. And Alasdair had
probably been a skeptic before he’d ever been a cop. Still . .
.

A sudden series of sharp raps made them both
jump, then each look around to see if the other had noticed. No,
the sound wasn’t a message from the next life, but from a former
one.

In one stride, Alasdair reached the door and
threw it open. Ciara stood on the front porch, her curls and
flounces outlined against the darkening courtyard. “Cheers,
Alasdair. We’re away. I’ll be talking with you, Jean. Have a good
night. Ferniebank’s bogle is a harmless one, I’m promising you
that.” With a good-natured megawatt smile, she turned to go.

Instead of slamming the door, Alasdair
watched Ciara stroll across the courtyard. Jean craned past his
shoulder, trying not to heave an aggravated sigh in his ear.

Keith Bell stood beside the van. He said, as
though continuing a conversation, “The surveyors need to outline
the foundations of the medieval hospice so we won’t damage them. We
can leave transparent panels in the floor over the old footings.”
He climbed into the passenger side and slammed the door.

“No need for surveyors,” replied Ciara as she
wafted into the driver’s seat. “I’ve got a friend who dowses a
treat. He’ll trace the foundations and the line leading to Rosslyn
as well. A shame Wallace will not be here to see the final designs,
but then, it’s all built on his foundation, isn’t it?”

The engine started. The red of the taillights
gleamed. The van backed and filled and rolled sedately through the
gate and out onto the road, leaving Jean’s and Alasdair’s cars
alone. A lamp attached to the front of the shop buzzed and came on,
shedding an eerie blue-tinted light across the courtyard.

“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggit
beasties and things that go bump in the night, Mystic Scotland
turns a profit, eh?” Alasdair’s tone was flat, emotionless. He
wasn’t being sarcastic. He was simply stating a fact. “The woman
would not recognize a bogle, a ghost, a spirit, or a specter if it
pinched her on the bum.”

“Really?” Jean shoved aside the vision of
Alasdair pinching Ciara’s ripe, round behind. “She has no ESP? She
got all that about the ghost walking down to the chapel and feeling
a chill and everything from the Ferniebank leaflet?”

“You and I, lass, have got more of a ghost
allergy in our fingernail parings than she’s got in her entire
body.”

“Well, telling stories is a respectable
profession. Probably about the third-oldest one.”

“The problem is, she’s not recognizing that
they’re stories. Not a bit of it.”

“Ah. I see.” Not that Jean was seeing the
entire vista, far from it, but at least she was peeking through the
keyhole at why the Alasdair and Ciara project had ever gotten
started, let alone why it had gone so sour.

Alasdair checked his watch and plucked an
industrial-strength flashlight from its bracket next to the door.
“It’s time to be closing the place down. Fancy a private tour of
the keep?” His lips were clamped in a straight line, not just his
upper one but his lower one stiff as well, and his jaw was set. And
yet his eye sparked again, if not with humor then at least with
resignation.

Well it only took a few sparks to set
tinder alight, if the tinder was susceptible to flame
. “So
there really is a ghost.”

“Decide for yourself,” Alasdair answered, and
escorted her into the dusk.

Modern wooden steps led up to the entrance of
Ferniebank Castle. Jean levered herself over the stone threshold
into a small room so dark she could make out only the rectangular
shapes of three more doorways, two opaque with shadow, one dimly
lighted. Chill oozed from the gritty floor through her shoes and up
her legs. A musty odor, like that of a wet dog, hung so thick in
the air it felt like a pillow pressed to her face.

No, Ferniebank was not making a good first
impression. To heck with her feminist principles—she inched closer
to Alasdair’s steady, sturdy body.

He was either oblivious to her discomfort or
too polite to comment. “This entrance might not have been the
original. Hard to say. These places are like mazes in three
dimensions.”

“Your average Virginia plantation looks
simple by comparison,” Jean managed to reply.

He leaned past her. A switch snapped and a
light came on, a bare bulb dangling from the vaulted ceiling like a
spider’s prey from its web. “The electricity supply’s a bit dodgy
in these airts,” Alasdair said, brandishing the flashlight the way
he might once have brandished a truncheon. “The electric flex dates
back to the last spasm of restoration round and about 1900, before
the place was abandoned. I’d not go in here after dark without this
torch.”

She could say something about not going into
the place after dark at all, but she was inflicting enough of her
phobias on the man as it was.