The Secret of Isobel Key (12 page)

“You can flip through that book this afternoon, if you like. Mind you be careful of the pages! That's very precious to my family.” Lou detected a twinkle in the professor's eyes, despite his gruff tone, and she smiled hesitantly

“Thank you, professor,” she murmured.

“Now, then,” the old man said gruffly as he settled himself once more in his chair, “there are many more tales and many more strange and mysterious disappearances. Will you be having time to listen more now?”

Brian glanced at Lou first, worried that she might be growing tired or bored, but she nodded at him absentmindedly, her fingers tracing the leather binding of the book in her lap. “Yes, professor, we'll stay a bit longer.”

Brian's answer pleased the professor, who immediately started in on another story, something about the fairy queen and her mortal lover. Brian listened, engrossed, but only half of Lou's attention was on the old man and his marvelous tales. The rest of her mind was still lost in the tale of murder and witchcraft. Over and over again, Lou examined the details in her mind, her fingers idly stroking the book in her lap. Finally, she opened the cover.

A shiver ran up and down her spine as her eyes took in the words, written in precise, scrolling script, “This book belongs to one Isobel Key.” The pages were covered with the same neat handwriting; Isobel's handwriting, Lou realized with a jolt. She had foolishly expected the book to be printed because of the beautiful binding. She wasn't prepared for the intimate experience of seeing something written by a person long dead.

Struggling in some places where the ink had blurred with age, Lou began to read the herbal. She marveled at the precision of the notes, the specificity of the measurements, the detail afforded to the sketches of the different plants and ingredients in question. The professor was right, Lou thought, the woman really had been a remarkable scholar. Many of the recipes and sketches seemed related in some way to pregnancy and female fertility: the forward-thinking Isobel included her own recipe for preventing conception on the same page as a mixture guaranteed to rid a woman of a child she was carrying.

Not all of the pages contained information related to motherhood, however, and Lou read cures for colds, headaches, and cramps. At one point she began to wonder if Isobel Key had in fact possessed some knowledge of witchcraft and spells, for a variety of recipes in the herbal
were
simply titled “for love”, and Lou recognized some of the key ingredients from modern love spells, including roses and vanilla.

Would Isobel have known all this just from the careful study of plants and their effects, Lou wondered, or had the woman received a more occult form of training?

When the news reached Isobel that her sister had died in labor, she was overcome with grief. She refused to eat and barely slept, weeping and mourning for her beloved sister. No one ever said it aloud, but Isobel was certain that her sister would have been alive and delivered of a healthy child if she and not that fool doctor had been called to attend the birth.

Isobel went almost mad in her grief, and for months no one saw her. She ceased tending patients, and many of the folk around the village who had been loyal to her began to seek out the doctor when they were plagued by aches and pains.

Michaelmas passed, and still no one saw Isobel. When All Hallow's came and went, the people of St. Andrews were quite certain that the poor woman was dead. But one day in late November, she emerged from her cottage, for she had decided to call upon her brother-in-law and offer to raise her namesake, for surely a man who had just lost his beloved wife had no way to raise a little daughter. Isobel thought that perhaps little Nan would heal the gaping hole left in heart by her sister's death, and despite her less than amiable relationship with her brother-in-law, she was determined to plead with him. She was prepared to beg humbly, if she had to: the child was the only family Isobel had left.

The signs of her grief were written plainly on her face: her eyes were sunken and dark in her pale skin, and where she had once been a healthy, robust looking woman, now her clothing hung off her like oversized drapery. There were new lines carved around her mouth, lines which gave her once joyous face the appearance of frowning constantly. She passed a few people as she made her journey, but they could not bear to look at her more than once, for her grief seemed so raw and powerful that many who saw her fancied they would begin to weep if they gazed upon her long.

None who saw her that day could bring themselves to warn of what she would find at the Nairn home, and they turned away from her in shame. When Isobel knocked smartly on the familiar blue door, she was startled to see a woman standing on the other side of the threshold. They stared at each other for a moment, and Isobel collected her wits and announced that she was the sister of the wife of Alexander Nairn, and she would like to speak to her brother-in-law at once. The woman, standing like a statue before her, made no move to invite Isobel in, but rather gaped at her, dumbfounded. When Isobel repeated her request, louder this time, for it occurred to her that the serving woman might be hard of hearing, the woman shook her head and started to close the door in her face. Isobel pushed herself inside, and the woman began to yell at her to leave her home, at once, before she called the town watch. Isobel was struck dumb when the women proceeded to tell her quite grandly that she was the wife of Mr. Alexander Nairn, and she had never had a sister a day in her life. With those words, she managed to shove Isobel out the door, which she slammed behind her with a resounding crash.

In a daze, Isobel turned from the house and headed back to her cottage. When before she had looked like a figure straight from the grave, her eyes now burned with a dull rage, and children who had known her all their lives crossed the street before her so that her gaze would not fall upon them like a curse.

A kindly woman whom Isobel had helped through four pregnancies saw her and coaxed her inside to take some tea and bread. While Isobel sat, silently sipping the steaming tea, the goodwife regaled her of the scandal of Alexander Nairn's recent marriage. His wife had scarce been in the ground a month, the woman said, before Miss Janet appeared at his side.

They
were wed with unseemly haste, and what was worse, the woman continued in a lowered voice, they wed on All Hallow's, a time all know belongs to the dead and not the living. He had cursed his second marriage, sure enough, the goodwife was certain, and no one in the town was quite certain where this bride, this Janet, had come from in the first place.

Perhaps she was the devil in the guise of a flesh and blood woman, the goodwife mused, for what living woman would ever consent to be wed on the night which belonged to the dead? To Isobel it did not matter if Janet were the daughter of the king himself. All that mattered was the grievous wrong that had been done her sister. Her husband had not even taken the proper mourning time before remarrying, and Isobel would never forgive him for that. Alexander Nairn had taken her sister from her once in childhood, a second time in childbirth, and now he had the nerve to defile her memory in death. Isobel wanted to see justice served against this man who had broken her family and thereby broken her heart. She was not sure which of the two things was more unforgivable.

That evening, back in the hostel room she and Tammy were sharing with two girls traveling from Germany, Lou couldn't pull her thoughts away from the old book. She sat there, staring into space and seeing in her mind the plain leather cover of the witch's herbal.

She was so wrapped up in the past that she didn't notice their German roommates enter, nor did she hear Tammy come in until she poked her under the ribs, sending Lou nearly out of her skin.

“Brian told me you had some kind of luck today. Something about a book?” Lou nodded absentmindedly. “Girl, if I had a handsome, red blooded Scotsman waiting to take me to dinner, you wouldn't find me daydreaming about ancient history!”

Lou jumped up, alarmed. “What time is it? Oh, shit, I told him to meet me here at seven, am I late?” Frantically, Lou tried to calm her hair at the same time as she tugged on her shoes, with little success. Her hair was crushed against her head where she had been leaning against the back of the chair, and her left heel hung off the back of her shoe, making her look like a child trying to cram her feet into her mother's shoes.

Tammy just laughed. “Get going!” Tammy handed Lou her purse and gave her a gentle shove.

Thundering down the narrow stairs, Lou almost lost her left shoe in her rush to get to the lobby where Brian was, indeed, waiting for her. He smiled when he saw her, and she felt her feet begin to melt. She rushed forward, almost knocking a lamp over as she tripped on her loose shoe.

“Woops, steady there!” Brian's arms shot out and cradled her, stopping her fall. The porcelain lamp teetered precariously on its stand, but Lou barely noticed; she was too aware of Brian's strong arms wrapped around her. He coughed and helped her stand upright, and he allowed his hand to linger on her shoulder a moment more than was necessary. Lou fought back another blush. What was it about this guy? In less than a week, she was sure he had already seen her blush more than most people she had known for years.

“Sorry I'm late,” she spoke quickly, in an attempt to draw attention away from her less than graceful entrance. “I got so caught up in everything we learned this afternoon that I lost track of time.” Self consciously, she reached for her heel, trying to fit her shoe more firmly on her foot.

Brian laughed. “I figured that might be the case. You were so quiet on the walk back from the professor's; I guessed you had a lot of things rollin' around inside your mind.” She smiled up at him, pleased that he didn't seem to mind her absentmindedness, or the fact that she had almost killed him with a lamp.

“Come on, let's eat.” He grabbed her hand and led her out the door of the hostel.

He didn't let go of her hand until they were down the steps and in the street, and then Lou thought it must have been her imagination, but he seemed reluctant to drop her hand. He shoved his hands instead deep in his oversized coat pockets, looking like a serious child. Lou laughed, and Brian glanced at her, sheepishly.

“Well,” he said defensively, “I need to do something with my hands, otherwise I'll keep trying to hold yours, and well, I don't know if you would like that or not.” He sounded so shy that Lou felt herself growing confident.

“
I think that I'd like that quite a lot,” she whispered, and held out her hand to him. He looked at it for a moment, then looked at her face and smiled. He took her hand again, and her heart started to race.

“So, where are you taking me for dinner?” She asked him eagerly as they walked along.

“That's a secret.”

“There will be food, right?” Lou tried to joke, but her stomach grumbled right at that moment, and they both laughed.

“I promised ye' dinner, and dinner there will be. Now, no more questions!” Brian shook his finger at her as he said this, mock stern, and they both burst out laughing again. It felt so easy to be with him; Lou wasn't used to being comfortable with many people, but something about Brian just felt right.

They passed kilt shops and music shops, yarn shops and clothing shops. Out of the corner of her eye, Lou noticed a hand-lettered sign advertising fortune telling. Her skin prickled, and she made a mental note to come back.

As they turned a corner, Brian led her to a tiny restaurant with a menu that advertised pizza, calzones, and salads. There were three rickety little tables with folding chairs, and nothing resembling the romantic dinner she was hoping for. Brian ordered a huge pizza with everything on it, glancing at Lou, who nodded in resignation, but then he asked for it to go. Lou looked at him, surprised.

“Aren't we going to stay and eat here?”

Brian shook his head. “Nope. Not part of the plan. But you have to taste this pizza, it's the best on the planet.”

Lou smiled doubtfully at his enthusiasm: last she heard, the Scots weren't famous for their pizza.

About fifteen minutes after they had arrived at the pizzeria, Lou found herself walking again, carrying napkins and forks while Brian proudly held the pizza out in front of him. He led them down a narrow side street, and Lou's stomach soured a bit. Darkness had fallen, and for a moment, she felt afraid. Her single woman instincts started to kick in, and she realized that going on this date with a relative stranger in a foreign country might have been a mistake. Maybe he wasn't the nice guy that he seemed, maybe it was all an act, and now he was taking her somewhere to murder her. Almost four years of living in Boston had increased Lou's instinctual timidity, and she was surprised that she hadn't been afraid of Brian before. She tried to calm herself, reminding herself that Tammy knew they were out together, and Tammy would surely come looking for her if she didn't return to the hostel tonight. With a sinking heart, Lou realized that Tammy wouldn't go looking for her tonight, because she'd assume Lou and Brian had hooked up.

The road they were on sloped dangerously and Lou slipped a couple of times in the dark. Brian tried to steady her, but his hands were filled with the pizza box. They emerged from the narrow street, and all of Lou's fears melted away. Inky waves crested along the horizon, and in the dark, the sandy beach looked iridescent. Brian had led them down to the water's edge, which was far from deserted. A bonfire was just getting started, and lots of people were clustered around, talking and laughing. She felt relief wash over her, and couldn't stop herself from saying, “I haven't had a picnic in a long time.”

“I hope you won't be too cold. We could always join those kids by the fire.”

Lou shook her head. “I'm not cold, at least not yet, but I am starved. Let's eat!”