The Burning Glass (8 page)

“Say the word ‘castle,’ ” Alasdair went on,
“and most trippers from your part of world think of something like
Floors, outwith Kelso.”

“Well, yeah. Too many Hollywood set
designers.” Floors was a vast Georgian country house, remodeled and
romanticized by the dictates of Victorian fashion into a fairytale
castle, its roof bristling with turrets, pinnacles, and cupolas.
Jean visualized carriages manned by white-wigged footmen decanting
bejeweled guests into Floors’s marble halls. Here, at Ferniebank,
she imagined reivers in steel bonnets riding down out of the mist
like avenging—not angels. Demons.

Setting one of his large, comforting hands in
the small of her back, Alasdair guided her through the lighter
doorway into a square vaulted room. Each of its three windows
contained a gleaming slice of the twilight. This room, now, had a
sort of derelict charm.

If her sense of direction wasn’t too badly
skewed, the wall that was covered on this side with paneling so old
it looked moth-eaten was the one that on the other side was neatly
whitewashed stone, the line of demarcation between castle and flat.
The paneling was interrupted by a probably eighteenth-century
Georgian door, its frame lopsided. In the narrow slices of space
between door and frame Jean saw nothing but charcoal-gray stone. On
the apartment side, then, the doorway had been filled in and
painted over. There was something—not necessarily eerie, but
definitely evocative, perhaps even symbolic—about a blocked
doorway.

But then, in this part of the world home
renovation didn’t mean a garage conversion. It meant generation
after generation remodeling for convenience, safety, and fashion.
She started breathing through her nose again and discovered that
she was getting used to the smell. “This is the Laigh Hall, right?
The lower hall, where the flunkeys and the petitioners awaited the
lord’s pleasure. I bet the flat used to be the kitchens, although
that fireplace in the living room is too small to have been the
main one.”

“Right you are. The High Hall’s just this
way.” Alasdair waved her on toward a spiral staircase leading
upwards. She placed each foot with care on the misshapen treads. If
she slipped he would break her fall, but breaking him wasn’t what
she had in mind.

“Ferniebank’s a right ordinary border keep,”
Alasdair said to her back, “built of whinstone rubble with
sandstone dressings and an unusually tenacious lime mortar. The
place might once have been related to the royal stronghold at
Roxburgh.”

“Which went into a decline after James III’s
favorite cannon blew up and took him with it,” said Jean. “Sort of
the story of Scotland in microcosm, hoist with its own petard.”

Behind her Alasdair made a sound between a
snort and a chuckle. “We’ve got a second-, perhaps third-rank
castle here. The action was always somewhere else, ’til now, at the
least.”

They emerged into a large, tall room, this
one with a wooden floor that made each footstep resound like a
drumbeat. In the sudden light of another bare bulb, Jean saw
stained plaster ceilings, windows gleaming from deep embrasures,
paneling revealing the ghosts of old paintings, and the empty maw
of a fireplace big enough to set up an office for Keith Bell,
complete with drafting table and water cooler. The place was
growing on her, she decided, and not like mold.

A rustling noise, almost like whispering,
seemed to emanate from the stone itself. But her sixth sense, the
ghost detector, didn’t react. “Bats? Birds? Rats?”

“All of the above.” Alasdair shot a glance
upwards, but even he didn’t have x-ray vision. His spook sensor
must not be sounding an alarm, either. “The well might date to
Roman times or before, the original chapel to the ninth century,
perhaps. The castle’s right modern, dates to the fourteenth
century, built by Robert the Bruce’s henchman, William Saint Clair
of Rosslyn and Orkney. The William Saint Clair who built Rosslyn
Chapel in the fifteenth century built a new chapel here as well,
obliged to maintain his status with the neighbors.”

“And the hospice? Does that go back to Robert
the Bruce looking for a cure for his leprosy or syphilis or
whatever it was he had?”

“So it seems. Though the most famous patient
was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, in 1566. I cannot tell you a
thing, can I?” he added, not in the acid tone he might once have
used, but like a teacher indulging a bright pupil.

She’d loosened up enough that she was able to
curtsey, spreading imaginary crinolines around her bent knees. A
good thing she wasn’t actually wearing a skirt, though. There were
sneaky little drafts in this place, teasing her ankles like
invisible cats. “You’ve done your homework, too.”

“Of course.” He acknowledged her curtsey with
a regal inclination of his head. “Soon after Mary’s son James
succeeded Elizabeth, becoming king of England as well as king of
Scots, Ferniebank fell into the hands of the Kerrs, who were widely
considered to be ruffians.”

“And who now own Floors. Miranda’s Duncan
owes a lot more to that branch of the family, the, er,
smoothians.”

That time Alasdair actually laughed. “At some
point the place was handed off, voluntarily or otherwise, to the
Douglases. One of them updated it in the 1680s or so. Good job he
wasn’t wealthy, or he’d have torn it down and built himself a
mansion.”

“Plus he probably wanted to hang on to some
of the defensive elements. Peace hadn’t exactly broken out yet in
Scotland.”

“Who’s to say if it ever will do?” Alasdair’s
outstretched flashlight guided Jean into another stairwell. “The
last Douglas was a wastrel who mortgaged the place to the
Rutherfords. They foreclosed in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, but only
Gerald, Wallace’s grandfather, ever lived here. He was an artist
and poet—a ruin suited his fancies, I reckon.”

“They’d have fueled mine, too, but in a
different way,” Jean said.

“After Gerald died in the flu epidemic just
after World War One, the place fell further into disrepair, until
Angus Rutherford, white knight, rode to the rescue. And there you
have the potted history of Ferniebank. Mind your head, that
lintel’s a bit low.”

It was really low if Jean had to duck. She
maneuvered out of the stairwell and followed Alasdair’s guiding
light through the two upper stories. He paused only once to get his
bearings—his inner compass was directional as well as moral, it
seemed—and spoke again when they’d achieved the cap house, a tiny,
gabled room perched atop the castle like the pilot house atop a
steamboat. Indicating the door leading out to the roofs, he said,
“Fancy a dander round the parapet?”

“I’ll pass, thanks. When they were handing
out the phobias—phobii?—I missed out on the fear of heights. Still,
the roof of a crumbling old building isn’t a good place for a
moonlight stroll.”

“Or a sunlight one.” Alasdair led the way
back down the narrow, twisting steps to the top floor, where he
directed her to one of the rooms beneath the eaves. The
nineteenth-century door in its sagging frame was held open by a
piece of twine running between the rusted knob and a hook embedded
in the wall.

This time when he clicked the switch there
was no burst of harsh, yellow light. “Well, then,” he muttered, and
switched on the flashlight to guide them to a dormer window filled
with twelve panes of dusty antique glass. Then he cast the light
around the empty room. Behind the splintered paneling the stones
were black, almost as sooty as the stone in the empty
fireplace.

Jean felt as though a drapery settled over
her, cold, heavy, and sad. Trying to evade her unease, she turned
to look out at the dark countryside. Its constellations of lights
were distorted by the old glass, so that they seemed distant in
time as well as in space. If she made her way to one of those
lights, would she find herself in, say, an elegant
eighteenth-century drawing room whose inhabitants were speculating
on Charles Edward Stuart’s claim to the throne . . . A car passed
on the road below, headlights feeling their way, the engine noise
blending with the rush of wind in the trees.

With a shiver, Jean looked back into the
room. Forlorn antiquity got her every time, and with its peeling
paint, chipped mantelpieces, collapsing plaster, cracked paneling,
and cobwebbed cupboards, Ferniebank was certainly forlorn. To say
nothing of fascinating, layered with the debris of lives beyond
counting.

As Michael had said, if it weren’t for people
like Ciara, these old buildings would fall to ruins. If she and
Keith could be trusted not to throw the historical baby out with
the trendy bath water, her conference and healing center would mean
new life in the old vessel. Jean gritted her teeth and sent a
feeler of appreciation toward the Mystic Scotland van, which would
be past Kelso by now. But then, why should it even be past
Stanelaw? Ciara and her minion were probably staying in the
village, now that Ferniebank was at last the scene of the
action.

“What are you thinking?” Alasdair stood so
close beside her she could feel the prickle of his energy field.
His grave profile was pale against the gloom outside the beam of
light. He wasn’t asking what she thought, but what she felt.

She focused, pulling her thoughts around her
like a cloak. Warily, so nothing would leap out at her, she eased a
psychic toe into her sixth sense.
Heavy. Sad. Cold. Uneasy
.
The chill teased the back of her neck, crushing her shoulders with
the inert weight of earth or clay.
“The prime of our land are
cauld in the clay,”
went the old lament, “The Flowers of the
Forest.”

“This is the room that’s haunted,” she
whispered, stating, not asking.

“Oh aye.”

“Quiet as the grave, still as death . . . I
can’t see or hear a thing.”

“Nor can I. But I can feel it, a dirty great
stone in the pit of my stomach. An icicle in my gut.”

The gelid pressure seemed to lift, and the
fine hair on the nape of her neck settled back into place. Jean
swung around to face Alasdair. In the backspatter of light from the
flashlight, his regular, even ordinary, features looked as though
they’d been hacked out of whinstone and assembled with an unusually
tenacious intellect. “Is that how it feels to you?” she asked.

“It’s different for you, is it?”

“It’s like a wet blanket, a literal one. And
a sensation on the back of my neck like invisible cobwebs.” She
glanced over her shoulder, but nothing was there that hadn’t been
there a moment earlier. Ghosts weren’t dangerous. They were only
recordings of emotions long past. It was the emotions themselves
that hurt.

“Reality can be slippy at best,” murmured
Alasdair. “But losing it entirely can be a bit . . .”

“Disconcerting,” Jean finished, opting for a
milder word than
horrifying
. “I was wondering back in June
if the two of us together made a sort of critical mass when it
comes to ghost-spotting.”

“Aye, I was thinking that as well. No joy
this night, though—the ghost’s not walking.”

“Or no sorrow, depending. Somebody has to
have seen this ghost to know it’s a her. Did Wallace sense her, do
you think? Or did he pick up the story from the leaflet, too?”

“It was Wallace who wrote the leaflet, as
well as illustrating it. Like as not he heard the tale locally.
It’s the sort of tale you’re always hearing locally, fancies made
up after the fact.”

“If he did hear it locally, he didn’t fancy
it up any. The account in the leaflet’s pretty bald—Isabel Sinclair
died trying to elope. Do you know the details?”

“A longer version’s in the P and S files,
written in full nineteenth-century verbiage by Gerald Rutherford.”
Alasdair lowered the flashlight, creating a bright puddle at their
feet like a spotlight on a stage, the actors waiting in the wings
for their cues. “Isabel was the daughter of the Sinclair who was
laird of Ferniebank during the time of Mary Stuart. A time of grand
confusion and conflict, with religious issues fanning the flames
and Mary in it to the starched ruff at her neck, but then,
Scotland’s always having times of grand confusion and
conflict.”

“Let me guess. Isabel loved one man, but her
father wanted her to make a marriage of convenience. A guy twice
her age but filthy rich.” Jean gazed again around the room. No,
whatever was here earlier was gone. The room still seemed sad, but
it was the prosaic sorrow of dereliction.

“Got it in one. What makes this tale a bit
different is that Isabel’s lover—figurative or literal, who
knows—was one of the monks serving at the hospice.”

“So the relationship was doubly doomed.”

“That it was. The laird, her father, locked
her away here, in her room, ’til the wedding day. And she pined,
playing sad songs on her clarsach.”

“The Ferniebank Clarsach, the one dating back
to Robert the Bruce?”

“Oh aye. The one Isabel herself played for
Mary during her visit to the hospice, landing herself a position as
lady-in-waiting. The one stolen from the village museum. Next
time,” added Alasdair, “they’d jolly well better be asking P and S
for assistance.”

“No kidding. Have you heard anything more
about that? Is there a suspect? A trail? Clues?”

“No clues. Or none for me, at the least. It’s
not my business.” His tone had an edge that made Jean glance around
sharply, but he was already going on with the story. “The monk—he
must have had a name, but that’s dropped out of the telling—he and
Isabel worked out a plan.”

“They probably found a sympathetic servant to
exchange messages. Or he’d signal to her from the chapel—not as
many trees then, I bet.”

“I’m not seeing them waving semaphores,” said
Alasdair. “However they managed, they agreed that on the day of the
wedding, midsummer’s morn, she’d set the keep afire. Everyone would
go running outside, bringing her along, and she’d make her escape
with the monk.”