Ashes to Ashes

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Rebecca bit her tongue before she said, “Yes, your grace,” and dropped him a curtsey. Who did he think he was, the Duke of Argyll? Probably whatever scion of the Campbell family was the duke, he was more polite than this, his poor relation. She couldn’t imagine anyone looking— and being— less of a threat than she was.

  She found the light switch inside the kitchen door. A wonderfully bright bank of fluorescents illuminated a kitchen much younger than the house. Range, refrigerator, telephone— more incongruities, but she wasn’t about to complain. She laid the sacks on a vinyl-topped work island and put up the perishables: low-fat milk, skinned chicken breasts, and broccoli. She hadn’t been far wrong about Michael’s eating habits. The refrigerator contained only a package of processed cheese, two tomatoes, and an open can of frozen orange juice protruding a spoon like a sneering tongue. A couple of cans of Canadian beer sat on the counter. Efficiently she stowed them away, too, and turned to look for a bread box.

  Michael’s Reeboks were padding up the staircase from the entry. “Your room’s on the second floor. The char aired it out yesterday.”

  Rebecca abandoned the rest of the groceries, hurried out of the kitchen and up the stairs behind him. She squinted into the room across the landing from the Hall. This was her room?

  “This is the study,” Michael announced. A shaft of sunlight picked out a Chippendale secretary piled with papers and trinkets. Beyond the boundary of the light, the shadows, even darker by contrast, swarmed with opaque shapes that might be cabinets and bookcases. A human form stood with preternatural stillness against the far wall. Rebecca’s eyes narrowed. “Suit of armor,” said Michael, and started up the next flight of stairs.

  Rebecca rolled her eyes, as much at herself as at him, and followed. What he called the second floor Americans called the third; in British the first floor was the ground floor. Some people had the knack of making her feel dumb. And she’d thought Ray was exasperating.

  This staircase was a circular one, so steep and narrow the only banister was a rope wound around the central pillar. The stone treads spiraled upward into shadow. The two sets of footsteps, magnified by the thick walls, wafted faintly up the stairwell and died away in the dark recesses of the upper stories. The shaft was a giant chimney flue, stirring with a chill draft like the breath of the house itself. Rebecca tasted acrid dust, musty leather, and furniture polish.

  Michael led the way into a corridor. A solitary light bulb revealed three doors, one in each wall. Michael threw open the one across from the stairwell. “Bathroom and toilet.” The porcelain fixtures were of 1920’s vintage, forty years after the house was built. Fortunately the Forbeses’ taste for authenticity hadn’t extended to chamberpots under the bed.

  “Bedroom.” Michael dropped the suitcases inside the left-hand door. One last ray of sunshine illuminated a canopied bed, a huge carved armoire like something out of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a dressing table, and an inappropriate but welcome space heater installed in the fireplace. It looked clean and comfortable; Rebecca hadn’t expected a luxury hotel.

  Something oozed suddenly around her ankles. She jerked, imitating Michael’s electric jolt of startlement. The butterscotch and white cat crouched at her feet, the fur on his neck bristling, yellow eyes focused on some infinite point beyond the confines of the landing or of the castle itself. How did he— that’s right, she’d left the front door open when she’d rushed in.

  “Well,” said Michael, nudging the animal with his toe and getting a disdainful glance in response. “Greyfriars Bobby watchin’ for old James?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Didn’t you know, then, the man was found dead by the caretaker at the foot of yon staircase?”

  Rebecca’s hair bristled like the cat’s. “Here? I— I thought he died in the hospital, I guess.” She cleared her throat. No, there was no chalk mark outlining a body on the broad planks of the floor, just the cat crouching and looking at— at something. “Not surprising a 96-year-old would fall down a spiral staircase. The cat was James’s? What’s his name?” She bent to stroke him. He hollowed his back evasively and glided up the stairs.

  Michael actually emitted a chuckle. “James had more of a sense of humor than his dad. He named the cat Darnley.”

  “For Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband?”

  “Always thought old Harry was a bit of a tomcat, myself.”

  “He probably fathered more than James I, you’re right.”

  “James VI of Scotland, James I of England,” Michael corrected. “If you don’t question that James was really Mary’s bairn.”

  Rebecca stared. That was an uncanny shot, coming so close to the subject of her dissertation. If the Erskine letter was really here at Dun Iain, it might answer that exact question. His comment was a good omen, she told herself, and stepped into the bedroom.

  The sunlight brightened a magnificent Sargent portrait, a woman in 1890s Gibson Girl garb, hair piled lavishly on her head, bosom upthrust, jewels at her throat. But her face was thin and pale, her eyes too big, hinting of anguish. The jewels seemed to choke her. The artist had skillfully shown the discrepancy between luxury of dress and poverty of emotion. “Mrs. John Forbes?” Rebecca asked, looking up at the painted face. “The candidate for martyrdom? No wonder she died young; it must’ve been quite a burden putting up with the old crock.”

  “She could’ve flitted anytime.”

  “No, she couldn’t. Back then a woman’s place was with her husband and son. Especially a wealthy woman, with no skills beyond piano-playing and embroidery. Where could she have gone, what could she have done?”

  “If you choose to suffer fools gladly, there’s no excuse for you,” Michael prounounced.

  And that, Rebecca responded mutely, is certainly something you’ll never be accused of. She pointed to the doorway opposite the bedroom. “What’s in there? More skeletons in closets?”

  If Michael heard her teeth grinding he ignored them. “That’s the piper’s gallery. Naething there but a set of ill-tempered pipes. No bogles to leap out and scare you.”

  “And you?” she replied with a laugh. “You almost cartwheeled when I spoke to you.” Through the door she glimpsed an elaborate plaster ceiling half erased by twilight, the vault of the two-story Hall.

  “You crept up on me,” he repeated indignantly.

  Her laugh evaporated for lack of nourishment. Rebecca realized she was exhausted; she’d gotten up before dawn to drive here. She threw her purse onto the bed and flicked open the closest suitcase. “I’d better unpack now.”

  Michael thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans and with disgruntled courtesy asked, “Would you like a cuppa?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  The soft pad of his footsteps faded away. Somewhere wood creaked and something, a hot water pipe, probably, sighed. Somewhere the cat glided through the shadows searching for its master, James Forbes, the bachelor, the miser. He’d mised enough to keep this place, with its compelling, disturbing discrepancies, going. And his heart was in the right place, to have willed the fruits of his father’s rapacity back to Scotland.

  Rebecca laid her makeup case on the dressing table. In the frame of the slightly tarnished mirror was a postcard picture of Dun Iain. Or was it? She pulled the card out and turned it over. The legend declared the structure to be Craigievar, the Aberdeenshire castle which was Dun Iain’s prototype.

  If Rebecca had known last summer she’d be working at Craigievar’s bastard child in America, she’d have rented a car in Perth and gone there. But then, Ray would have pointed out that the tour bus was already paid for, the countryside was the equivalent of the wilds of Africa, and the natives drove on the wrong side of the road. “That’s just the way things are, Kitten,” he’d have said patiently, and emitted another cloud of smoke from his pipe.

  Prying Ray from his routine for that trip had been quite a feat, even though once there he’d followed her in bemused pleasure fr
om site to site. But then, back home, it’d been back to the schedule. Tuesdays they’d eat pizza, half black olives for him, half green peppers for her. Sundays they’d attend the concert at Clemens Auditorium. Fridays he’d bring his overnight bag to her apartment and turn another page in The Joy of Sex.

  Three years ago his calm, quiet, predictability had been endearing, evidence of his conscientious effort to do right by her. Rebecca wasn’t sure when it’d become stultifying. She’d told him she’d eat olives if he’d eat peppers, that she’d buy tickets to a football game if he’d go with her, that some Friday she’d like to wing it without the book.

  He’d responded with loving pats on the head. She’d been considering dynamite in his coffee when she heard about the position at Dun Iain.

  Rebecca unpacked her tape player, found a plug, and snapped in a Mozart tape. The music was tinny and shallow, absorbed by rather than dispelling the silence. The walls seemed to lean disapprovingly inward. She turned off the player. On the mantelpiece she laid her dog-eared copy of John Forbes: Man of Iron; the thirty-year-old biography had cost her quite a trek through the secondhand bookstores in Kansas City.

  She’d left her typewriter in the car. No great loss if it disappeared; it was a manual her parents had given her as a high school graduation present almost ten years ago. Oh, for a computer.

  A programmer’s job, Ray frequently pointed out, would pay much better than her teaching job. And grad school was such a financial drain. If she wrote off her quest for a Ph.D., she could get that new car, that computer, a larger apartment. She already knew word processing, after all. Like a human Cuisinart she processed the musings with which Ray fertilized assorted philosophy journals: “Aristotle’s Poetics Revealed in ‘Saturday Night Live’”, or “Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’: the Paradigm of the Eighties.”

  “Publish or perish,” he’d say cheerfully. “You’re such a big help, Kitten. I’m all thumbs when it comes to a keyboard.”

  The armoire reeked of lavender. Rebecca searched for a plastic air freshener but found nothing. She hung up her blouses and dresses and left the doors open, threw her satin stocking bag into a drawer and checked the level of fluid in her contact lens case. A picture of Ray, looking professorial against a row of fake photographer’s books, went on the bedside table beside the case holding her glasses. Last Friday she’d had a headache; Ray, the Joy of Sex page all picked out, had been miffed. This was a man so set in his ways he’d ordered bourbon in Edinburgh.

  Rebecca leaned on the embrasure of the windowsill. Publish or perish. Even if she— when she— published the Erskine letter and joined Ray in the rarefied atmosphere of a doctorate, nothing would change. On that hypothetical future date she could marry him, and nothing would change.

  Her jaw ached, a sure sign of words left unsaid and emotions unexpressed. Elspeth Forbes gazed down from the paneled wall, not completely unsympathetic. Jan, amid the riot at the Burger King, had opined that distance fanned a large flame and extinguished a small one. Only 24 hours distant, Rebecca told herself, and she already had a damn good idea just which one she’d singed her fingers on.

  The sunlight ebbed from the world outside. The maple trees faded to gray. She was inside those multiple eyes looking out. In the twilight the lawns and trees lost all depth, as though they’d been painted on the panes of glass. If she raised the window, she might raise the landscape itself, seeing behind it nothing, the castle the only reality.

  Rebecca shook herself, turning back into the room. It was almost dark, illuminated only by the feeble light from the corridor. She clicked the switch by the door but the bulb in the midst of the ornate plaster ceiling didn’t respond. She tried the bedside lamp with the same result. All right then, time to make Dr. Campbell disgorge a couple of light bulbs as well as that cup of tea. And a sandwich would be good. A little food and a stress vitamin would steady her nerves.

  Rebecca closed the door into the piper’s gallery and peered up into the darkness blotting the upper staircase. She would explore the rest of the house tomorrow, in the daylight. If it contained enough of what Ray called junk, working even with His Grace Michael the Grouch Campbell would be worthwhile. After all, she was here to do two jobs, her own and the state’s.

  Starting down the staircase, she visualized Michael, festooned in the great kilt of the 17th century, lifting a lamp on the landing. In his informal 20th century clothes, longish hair and defensive posture he appeared barely twenty. He was probably closer to thirty, one of those aggravating men who look like boys until they’re forty, at which time they become distinguished.

  Something bumped on the staircase over her head— the cat, no doubt. The breath of the castle wafted coldly down the back of her sweater. Not sure if she was joking, Rebecca repeated under her breath the old Scots prayer: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us.”

  She skimmed by the black yawning apertures of Hall and study. The bright light from the kitchen made the model tomb look like a child’s plaster of paris school project. Michael was singing something to the effect that it’s good to be young and daring. His bravado scraped her mind like chalk skreeking across a blackboard. No one could really be daring, given the constraints of culture and sex and economics.

  At least he sounded more cheerful now. She hadn’t crept up on him. He’d seen her from the window… . The cat, Darnley, wasn’t upstairs but sat licking his paws on Mary’s marble stomach much as his namesake must once have curled against Mary’s skin.

  Rebecca stopped dead in the entry. From the kitchen Michael’s voice stuttered to a halt. One beat, two, and then he bellowed, “Blast you, woman, if I’d wanted my beer cold I’d have put it in the fridge myself!”

  And then again, Rebecca thought with a frustrated stamp at the unforgiving stone of the floor, wasn’t there also a prayer about deliverance from the wrath of the Campbells?

  Chapter Two

  Rebecca dreamed she was sitting in the upholstered seat of a tour bus, tied up like a Christmas package. Outside the window, green countryside lapped at the walls of a pink-beige castle. She had to have something inside that building. Urgently she banged her head on the glass. She wasn’t tied, she realized; Ray’s arms held her, his voice whispering soothing condescensions. The bus roared away in a cloud of exhaust. The castle— Dun Iain? Craigievar?— disappeared behind ribbons of asphalt and slipped forever from her grasp.

  The roar of the bus grew louder. Rebecca swam suddenly from sleep, her mind clutching one thought: that prayer was not for deliverance from the wrath but from the greed of the Campbells.

  The noise was a vacuum cleaner. The housekeeper was here. Rebecca fought off the smothering embrace of the blankets and sat up. So much for the romance of sleeping in a canopied bed. Claustrophobic, that’s what it was. After all, the original purpose of a canopy was to protect the sleeper against zoological paratroopers from a thatched roof.

  She should never have drunk that tea. Michael had brewed it strong enough to dissolve a spoon, assuming she would dilute it with milk. She hadn’t, and had gulped cup after cup of the scalding stuff over sandwiches and banalities. When they’d adjourned next door, to the room which was fitted out with reclining chairs and a TV set, her eyelids had fallen to half-mast. She’d left Michael watching an old episode of M*A*S*H, replaced the two light bulbs, and gone to bed.

  But then, perversely, her eyes had popped open. The house had creaked and sighed, the wind had moaned around the turrets, and Michael had clomped endlessly up and down the staircase and across the ceiling above her head, his footsteps as ponderous as her own heartbeat.

  Ray smiled from his photo beside her bed, his bland, Slavic face bisected by stylish glasses. He’d paid more than his half of that tour of Great Britain; if it hadn’t been for him, she’d never have set foot there. Better to be shipped about like a package than never to have been there at all.

  She threw back the covers and groped f
or her slippers and her glasses. The window overlooked a static vista of central Ohio, the sky smudged with cloud and the maples tossing in the wind. Under that pewter sky their leaves were less crimson than splotches of dried blood… . Rebecca laughed at herself. What an image. Get away from Ray’s dampening influence for a day and already her imagination had become overactive.

  Nikes, jeans, and a Pringles of Scotland sweater made a suitably efficient outfit. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, embellished it with a scarf, and considered the effect. Without its framing waves her face seemed pinched; the cheeks that yesterday had been fashionably hollow looked this morning as though they’d been sucked dry by a vampire. Her brown eyes were as disproportionately large and dark as those of Elspeth Forbes gazing from her portrait just over Rebecca’s shoulder.

  The woman’s necklace was gaudy but gorgeous, garnets and jet centering on a fiery gem that looked like the Hope diamond. The Hope was rumored to have brought bad luck to its wearer, and Elspeth’s slightly dazed, slightly desperate expression looked as if she believed hers, too, to be cursed. The biography didn’t say why she died so young. Of homesickness for her native Dundee, possibly, or from a broken heart. Rumor had it she’d been married off to the much older John Forbes after an unhappy love affair with a fellow Scot.

  Rebecca inserted contacts into her eyes and gold studs into her earlobes. She applied light touches of blush, eye shadow, mascara, lipstick. There, she looked healthier. Cosmetics were expensive, but it was self-respect to look as nice as possible.

  She headed for the staircase. A middle-aged woman was halfway up, lugging a vacuum cleaner and a basket of cleaning paraphernalia. “Let me help,” called Rebecca.

  The woman jumped and clutched at the breast of her flowered blouse. “Sweet Jesus, girl, don’t sneak up on a body like that!”