Ashes to Ashes

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “The ones in the prophet’s chamber?”

  “You’ve already seen them? Yes, those. I had my own ring modeled on them. Not that I had any intention of flattering him, you understand.”

  “I should hope not,” sighed Rebecca. Again her glass was empty. There was a wonderful taste of garlic, basil, and red wine in her mouth. Eric was still leaning close to her. The candlelight made his eyes look like polished smoky quartz— cairngorm, in Scotland… . All right, she ordered herself. “Poor John, and Elspeth, and James,” she said. “They just never found how to buy happiness, did they?”

  To her surprise Eric straightened. “Money can buy happiness,” he said quietly. “What it can’t buy is justice.”

  For a long minute she looked at the somber line of his profile. A lawyer with a conscience. Maybe he’d rather be in criminal law but doesn’t have the stomach for it, and feels guilty… . Her head was swimming. So James had thought the artifacts wanted to go back. Did he, too, imagine Rizzio’s murder and the terrible battle at Culloden?

  The waiter was hovering. Eric was smiling and nodding as if he’d never made a serious statement in his life. “I’m stuffed,” Rebecca protested laughingly. “I can’t eat another bite. You’ll have to roll me out of here. Except I’ll be so huge you won’t be able to lift me.”

  “You’re barely even a handful as it is,” Eric replied in mock reproof, and ordered chocolate mousse and espresso.

  Odd, Rebecca thought, how everyone seemed to suddenly think she was too thin. And she thought, a handful, huh? What part of her anatomy was he considering handling? She giggled helplessly, and Eric regarded her with indulgence that was far from platonic.

  The dessert and coffee were as delicious as the rest of the meal, and the jolt of caffeine helped to keep Rebecca from falling comatose in her plate. All too soon the day of reckoning came; the waiter appeared with the bill. Eric produced a pen and began to refigure it.

  She seized the opportunity to pull out her compact and renew her lipstick. Circumscribed in the mirror’s tiny circle, her face glowed and her eyes shone in the candle light. Tendrils of hair softened the often too-crisp lines of her features. If Ray could only see her now… . It was because Ray couldn’t see her now that she was so splendidly flushed and tipsy. Yes, the engagement was over, all but the shouting. Not that there’d be any shouting, not with Ray. Rebecca made a face at herself and returned her compact to her purse, where it clinked against the huge door key.

  Eric summoned the waiter and consulted over the new, improved version of the bill. The waiter bowed and scraped. The ceremony moved to its conclusion, the ritual presentation of the American Express card.

  When all was completed to his satisfaction, Eric tucked the receipt into his wallet and turned to Rebecca with an engagingly self-deprecating smile. “Sorry to take so long. But it’s the principle of the thing, isn’t it?” He captured her hand from her lap and this time really did hold it briefly to his lips. Amazing how the man could get away with gestures that would be ludicrous in another. The kiss tingled all the way to her toes.

  When she stood up, her knees were hardly steadier than her linguini. The rush of cold air and the chilly seat of the car cleared her head somewhat. Eric checked the gauges on the dashboard with the careful scrutiny of an astronaut preparing for launch.

  When they returned down franchise row, the neon lights of the pizza place shone innocuously over a few parked cars, but no living figures were in sight. Rebecca asked Eric to stop at the convenience store on the next block; she wasn’t going to spend one more day in that house without coffee. Eric not only stopped, he bought a can for her and assured her there was a coffeemaker in the pantry. “I brought it out there myself,” he told her. “James preferred tea for his elevenses, but I don’t think anything beats a good cup of coffee.”

  “Amen,” agreed Rebecca, and crinkled the bag happily in her lap between similarly happy if speculative glances at Eric.

  He was, she thought, orchestrating an old-fashioned seduction. Slowly, one day at a time, none of this “Hi, pleased to meet you, your place or mine” business. An affair might be just the ticket. No more commitments, not now. There was nothing wrong with simple mutual pleasure.

  Not that she was an expert on seduction. Ray was the only man she’d ever slept with. And he’d been the professor next door, a trusted friend, well before he ever became her lover. Once that placid quasi-domestic Friday night arrangement had been established, engagement had been the logical next step.

  Every now and then Ray would hint about how repressed she’d been before he came along. She supposed she had to allow him that brief glint of machismo. So it had taken her a while to discover the opposite sex. Once her caution would have been commended, not condemned.

  In the darkness she bit her lip and then smiled ruefully, wondering what had happened to that caution; she was considering this stranger as a potential lover. Her singed fingertips must be extraordinarily sensitive.

  All too soon the car turned into the driveway. There was Dun Iain, lit up like a Christmas tree. You can tell he’s not paying for the electricity, Rebecca said to herself. He’s left every light in the place blazing. The windows were squares of brilliance against the black invisibility of walls, ground, and cloudy sky. They looked even more like eyes than they had in the daylight. Considering all that she had seen from them, they were eyes.

  Pellets of rain struck the windshield in a brisk fusillade as Eric stopped the car and turned off the engine. He peered rather quizzically up at the house, then released both his and her seat belts and gently but firmly pulled her across the seat into his embrace.

  Not that she had any idea of resisting. The kiss sent static hissing down her nerve fibers. She wondered abstractedly if she’d frizzle up like a cartoon character caught in the throes of G-rated passion. But this was not G-rated. She melted against him.

  The can of coffee fell off her lap and cracked against his ankle. “Ow!” he exclaimed. “You could’ve just said no.”

  “I’m so sorry— I didn’t mean… . “They both scrabbled after the can, cracked their foreheads together, and subsided laughing against the seat.

  Eric escorted her to the door, took the key, and unlocked it. “If I were you, I’d get a locksmith out here to put in a new lock.”

  “This contraption lends it character, though, don’t you think?”

  He smiled and said, “I’ll be appearing on your doorstep again soon. I’d like to look over James’s papers one more time for news of Rachel Forbes’s descendants. If you don’t mind sharing the space.”

  “Of course I don’t mind.”

  “And we’ll have to do another dinner, or maybe a concert, soon.”

  “Yes. Definitely.” They kissed again, quickly but not superficially, and Eric ushered her inside. But not before her damp lips turned abruptly cold in the chill of the night.

  Just as the lights of the car flashed on, the rain came down in sheets. Rebecca slammed the door, locked it behind her, and stood with her back against the wood waiting for her red corpuscles to stop pirouetting like bubbles in champagne. Slowly her idiotic grin ebbed to an introspective smile.

  Eric was certainly a class act. How long had it taken him to smooth the sharp edges of his background— ten, fifteen years? But his manner wasn’t a seamless whole. His occasional somber abstraction suggested depths beneath the surface gloss. He held something back, kept something in reserve.

  Rebecca asked the marble features of Queen Mary, “Were any of your husbands like that? Francis, the gallant? Darnley, the dandy? Or Bothwell, the warrior? As if he were waiting, like a cat at a mouse hole?”

  The serene face of the queen, all passion spent, did not reply.

  Chapter Seven

  Rebecca was tempted to creep up the stairs and leap into the Hall screaming “Boo!”. But that would be a cheap trick. She shouted “Hello!” toward the light gleaming on the landing and walked into the kitchen.

  Even the ligh
t in the hood over the stove blazed away. The casserole dish sat on the counter, almost full of noodles and what looked like the flour paste children use in kindergarten. Dishes and cutlery were propped in the drainer, clean, and an empty can of beans lay in the trash can.

  So Michael had given up on Dorothy’s cooking. While she stuffed herself with enough Italian food for three: herself, Michael and… . Rebecca put the coffee in the cabinet, folded the sack, and wondered if Ray had ever gotten any spaghetti. She visualized him leaning against the kitchen counter in his apartment, spooning food off a paper plate, all alone.

  Dammit, she wasn’t his keeper. She’d heard that breaking off a serious relationship entailed a certain amount of guilt. All right, if that was the price, she’d pay it. Tomorrow she’d write him and get it over with. The misty glow cast by her senses dissipated, revealing the hard edges of reality. A shame that glow had barely lasted past the front door.

  When she put the sack in the pantry, she found Darnley’s dish filled with noodles; Michael had made every effort to get rid of the evidence. But Darnley had probably gone mousing. In fact, there was a mouse now. Rebecca bent and peered into the darkness beneath the wobbly shelves. No, she’d thought for a moment she’d seen tiny glittering eyes, but none were there now.

  Turning off lights as she went, she returned to the entry and again shouted “Hello!”

  “In here,” called a voice behind her, and she jumped.

  Michael was in the sitting room, stretching and yawning. That was it, he’d dozed off and hadn’t heard her come in. He looked comfortable enough, lying back in a recliner, the whiskey and a glass on the table beside him. The bottle wasn’t too badly depleted. The television wasn’t on, but the cassette player was. “Turn that off, please,” he asked.

  She turned it off. The cassette was one of the Scottish folk-rock bands she herself enjoyed, pipes, tin whistle, accordion and electric guitar.

  Michael’s lap overflowed with a pile of cloth and wooden tubes that looked like— that was an eviscerated set of bagpipes. “If you canna beat them,” he said, “you can always join them.” With a tiny brush he began to ream what Rebecca recognized as the chanter.

  “Where’d you get the brush?” she asked.

  “It’s amazin’ what you can find if you take a turn tae yoursel’.”

  And in ransacking the place he’d turned on all the lights. She shrugged off her coat and yawned.

  “I see your evenin’ was a success.”

  “Yes, I had a good time.”

  His eyes glinted briefly up at her. “He must be a dab hand at the chattin’ up. Your lipstick’s a’ smudged.”

  Touche. Hastily she reached into her pocket for a tissue. “What do you have against him, anyway?” she asked.

  “He’s fair taen wi’ himsel’, no doot aboot it. Poncin’ aboot wi’ yon fancy claes, fancy car, fancy manners.”

  “Nothing wrong with good manners,” said Rebecca. “Or with clothes and cars, for that matter.”

  Michael discarded Eric’s manners with an abrupt gesture that almost sent the brush flying across the room. “Treats me like a bluidy dogsbody. Always flytin’ and bletherin’ aboot, what’s this worth, allow for extra insurance, can you no leave this or that behind.”

  “That’s his job,” Rebecca protested.

  Michael glared at her. As though his words were a cork popping from a champagne bottle he blurted, “That’s as may be, if that’s all there was. But he tried tae gie me the sack. What the museum and the state dinna ken’ll no hurt them, he said. A little extra here and there, set aside the pretty things tae sell tae collectors and never gie a cheep aboot it. I pretended I dinna ken what he was on aboot, but I took a scunner tae him, right enough.”

  The whiskey had thickened Michael’s accent almost to incomprehensibility. Rebecca registered the rhythm but had to struggle for the meaning of the words. “Please,” she groaned. “You’re laying it on awfully thick. I’ve heard you talking what your southern neighbors would call proper English— would you mind?”

  His hands stopped dead at their task. Expressive, probing hands that moved as if they searched for rabbits in hats. Long elegant fingers, and slender wrists that seemed almost fragile… . The blue flare in his eyes dragged Rebecca’s gaze to his face and focused her thought.

  “I can talk just like a Beeb newsreader,” he said in a clipped Oxbridge accent. “Excuse me, BBC announcer to you. I’ve lived in London. I’ve had an English lass. Lady friend, except she was no lady.” He rammed the brush so violently into the chanter that Rebecca flinched. “I’m no ashamed o’ bein’ a Scot,” he concluded, sliding back into the rich tones of his native brogue. “I’ll no call my country ‘North Britain’, or talk like a toffee-nosed twit just tae please the absentee landlords bleedin’ the land dry, thank you just the same.”

  Rebecca inquired, “How much did you have to drink?”

  “I’m perfectly sensible. I just took a wee drap, for which I’m properly grateful tae you.” He raised his chin with exaggerated dignity. “You’re none tae sober yoursel’.”

  No, she wasn’t. She collapsed into a chair, kicked off her shoes and closed her eyes. Her mind was filling with a glutinous substance like cotton candy, across which memory left slow, sticky prints. Ray’s smile. The claymore. Eric’s eyes in the candlelight. A perfume bottle on the windowsill. Michael’s hands. She peeked through her lashes. “What did you say?”

  “Too much,” Michael replied sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  Rebecca opened her eyes the rest of the way. She’d accepted that when a man was drunk he was aggressive, blustering around looking for a fight; her father and her brothers always did. Her mother got sloppy and pitiful when she’d had too much.

  That was Michael, apologizing just when she when she’d thought she had him typed. “I’m sorry, too. I talk about manners and then criticize your speech. I don’t know what’s come over me. Everything here’s so— so intense.”

  Michael nodded. “Just that.”

  A curl at one corner of his almost-sensitive mouth reminded her of the tissue in her hand, and she scrubbed at her lipstick. What had she intended to ask? Oh. “You said Eric tried to give you the sack? Get you fired?”

  “The state’ll no take kindly tae my doctorin’ the books for him.”

  “You’re sure that’s what he wanted?”

  So much for that hint of tenderness. Again his mouth tightened in irritation. “I’m no sure. He only implied, he said naething direct. He’s a lawyer, him and his silver tongue.”

  Rebecca tensed, waiting for Michael to make some awful joke about the manifest abilities of Eric’s tongue, but he nobly resisted.

  “I think he tried tae buy me,” he concluded, “and I must’ve gie him the pip when he couldna. Probably never found anything money couldna buy.”

  “It won’t buy justice,” said Rebecca.

  Michael looked up at her from under his brows. “He maun hae justice, or faith he’ll take it, man,” he sang in an untrained but agreeable tenor.

  Yeah, Rebecca thought, it’s his word against yours. She opened her mouth to tell him what Eric had said about him and then clamped it shut. No sense in lighting his fuse again. “You gave him the pip?” She pictured some arcane British version of an obscene gesture.

  “I annoyed him. Wi’ any luck, half as much as he annoyed me.”

  “I think you did.” She frowned, squeezing thought from her mind. Assuming anyone had an embezzlement scheme was one heck of a leap. If Eric was the shady party, then he could’ve told her it was Michael just to shunt suspicion away from himself. If it was Michael, he could be throwing suspicion on Eric. But how could he know Eric had even brought up the subject? It would’ve been easier just to keep quiet. And how, for that matter, would Eric have known Michael would mention it?

  Maybe Eric was slick as well as— well, physically compelling. He was also the trustworthy family retainer. If he’d wanted to embezzle or steal anything, he could’ve done it
a long time ago.

  Each thought dissolved, airy and slightly sickening. Eric and Michael had had trouble communicating, Rebecca told herself. That was all. No one was trying to embezzle anything.

  The silence was tangible, the rush of wind and rain muted here behind the thickest walls of the castle. When Michael lay down the brush it sounded as if he’d struck the table with a two-by-four. He picked up a rag, started polishing, and sang, “The news frae Moidart came yestereen, will soon gar mony ferlie, for ships o’ war hae just come in, and landed Royal Charlie.”

  “1745,” said Rebecca. “But you don’t like Charlie.”

  “What I like are the old songs. We hae tint our plaid, bonnet, belt and swordie, how they’ll skip and dance ower the bum of Geordie.”

  “1715. Also a disaster, for the Highlanders at least.”

  “Ye’d better kiss’d King Willie’s loof, than come to Killiecrankie-o.”

  “And more civil war. Are there any songs for Bannockburn?”

  “There’s always ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ if you dinna mind the gore.” Michael considered the bottle of whiskey and shook his head. “The flowers o’ the Forest are a’ wede away.”

  “Flodden Field, 1513. Utter catastrophe.” Rebecca’s stomach muttered unhappily beneath her ribs, sending a revolting taste of chocolate and garlic into her throat. Justice, perhaps, for having eaten or drunk, flirted or fought, for having felt more than she’d let herself feel in years. Not that it mattered. If justice couldn’t be bought, it couldn’t even be defined. And Michael had to sit over there singing about lost causes.

  That was it. When he was drunk he was maudlin, a typical Celt. Just like me, she told herself. She struggled to her feet and was mildly surprised the heaviness of her skull didn’t flip her head over heels like a baby’s toy.

  “But pith and power, till my last hour, I’ll make this declaration: we’re bought and sold for English gold, such a parcel of rogues in a nation. Even though some o’ my ancestors were doin’ the sellin’.” Michael glanced up. “You look fair clapped oot. Get on wi’ you.”