Song for a Lost Kingdom, Book I

by Steve Moretti

  The prom ended for Adeena at the hospital, with her frightened parents being woken by the police in the middle of the night. It was late the next afternoon when she opened her eyes to find them surrounding her, thankful she had not left this earth.

  Now as she lay awake in the cottage listening to their whispers just outside her bedroom door, she thought about how they had always been there for her.

  But maybe this time, she was expecting too much of them.

  THE NEXT MORNING Jackie was up early. She wanted the new TV on while she got set for a day of cooking and baking.

  “So that thing works now?” Jackie called out to her husband, as he put on his jacket.

  “Should be okay. Just use the remote to pick the channel you want,” he responded as put on his jacket. William glanced at the shopping list. “This is everything?”

  “I think so, and make sure you get pastry flour, not cake flour. And pure lard please, not shortening.”

  He nodded and blew her a kiss before heading out the door. She was in a baking mood with two empty shelves in the freezer reserved for Jackie’s apple, rhubarb and cherry pies. She would soon fill them again.

  It was Monday morning, and it felt strange to still be off work. She had managed to get an extra week off, while William was finishing up his sabbatical. Looking after Adeena was her priority for the week, her sole patient as it were. Jackie needed to come up with a strategy for helping her poor suffering daughter. That along with getting the crust just right on the pastry.

  She smiled, thinking there was a better chance of success with the pies. Adeena’s emotional revelation last night left Jackie and William at odds. She burned thinking about his reasoning. He argued that the historical facts, the diary he brought from Scotland and of course his family’s affinity for ghosts from the past, all pointed to the strong possibility this could really all be happening.

  Jackie didn’t buy it. She spent three years of her life completing a Ph.D. to prove that the clairvoyance demonstrated by some autistic children had a scientific basis. While there were a few cases that defied easy explanation, almost all the children’s ‘abilities’ were due to factors such as near photographic memories, intuitive reasoning and in some cases perhaps, a type of memory that pre-dated their own birth. She had just read a study with evidence that DNA markers can transmit epigenetic memories across generations.

  Did something get passed down to Adeena from the Stuarts? Jackie would figure this out, one way or the other. Sometimes the best way was to get busy with something else, while your mind sifted through options in the background.

  Jackie reached for the remote and clicked the red power button. The new flat screen TV in the family room lit up. She poured some coffee and checked on the pea soup she was making. The ham bone and dried yellow peas had come to a boil. She turned the flame down and covered her tall cherry-coloured Creuset stockpot with its tightly fitted lid.

  On the TV, she noticed a preview for an upcoming segment on the morning talk show.

  “Adeena!” she called out. “Come and see this! There’re doing a thing on the NAC, on the orchestra!”

  Jackie carried her mug of coffee into the family room and turned up the volume. As the commercials ended and the next segment on the show began, Adeena emerged from her room, looking like she hadn’t slept much.

  “Morning,” she muttered, shuffling zombie-like to the kitchen.

  “Morning, belle,” Jackie replied in a sing-song voice. “Sleep okay?”

  Adeena mumbled something as the sounds of classical music came from the TV. There was an exterior shot of the National Arts Centre, then a close-up of a man sitting at a piano making notes. The caption under him read: “Friedrich Lang, NACO Music Director.”

  “Adeena! Look! Is that your boss?” Jackie exclaimed.

  Adeena stared at the TV, trying to focus. “Yup, that’s Lang. What is this?”

  “Not sure, it just started.”

  The image of the conductor gave way to a pan of the NAC Orchestra in concert and then to some close-up shots of them rehearsing. Adeena walked into the family room from the kitchen, sipping a coffee. “That’s our rehearsal,” she said. “Oh, that’s Southam Hall.” Adeena put her drink down and flopped onto the stuffed chair across from where her mother sat the sofa.

  The TV scene changed to a live studio interview with one of the program’s female hosts seated at a table in front of a stylish wrap-around fireplace in the background. Friedrich Lang sat across from her, smiling, He wore a collarless white shirt.

  “Tell us about your composition, Maestro,” the host began. “It’s brand new, right?”

  “Correct,” Lang replied. “I call it Voyage of Destiny. I’ve been actually been working on it for some time.”

  Adeena stood up. “Liar! You stole it from me, you bastard.”

  Jackie looked over at Adeena. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just a sec,” Adeena snorted. “I want to see what kind of bullshit he feeds her,”

  The host of the show looked impressed. “It’s not often that we have the music director and conductor of our national symphony, who is also a composer. Can you tell us a more about your new work?”

  Lang smiled. “I have always been drawn to Brahms and Bach naturally, but my hero of course, is Ludwig.”

  “Beethoven?”

  “Ja. Naturally, I’m not comparing myself to him, but in Germany where I grew up and studied, he was everywhere. It felt like he was alive, still composing, inspiring me to find my voice.”

  “Fascinating!” the host gushed. “Is your work a tribute somehow, to him? To Ludwig van Beethoven?”

  There was a pause as Lang considered the question. “I always wanted to capture his journey, his voyage, painful and difficult as it was, towards his musical destiny.”

  Adeena grimaced. “What a fucking load of crap!”

  “Adeena,” Jackie interrupted. “He’s your boss.”

  The interview lasted another few minutes and included cut-away shots of Lang leading the orchestra in rehearsals playing Katharine’s score. Adeena grabbed the TV controller as the interview ended and turned the set off with a purposeful click as if vanquishing a demon.

  “Wow!” she snapped. “I can’t believe he is getting away with this! He took the music Grandma sent to me and is trying to claim he wrote it. A tribute to Beethoven? Fuck!”

  Jackie got up from her chair to check on the soup. “Are you sure it’s the same music?”

  “He hasn’t changed a single note,” Adeena replied. “Mom, it’s breaking my heart. I’m so pissed off about this.” She walked back into the kitchen. “You know, I almost want to quit, tell the whole world what he’s doing.”

  Jackie was worried. Adeena had always been impulsive and stubborn. “You’ve worked your whole life for this chance. You told me since you were five that you wanted to play cello with the orchestra. You can’t quit now.”

  “It doesn’t bother you? What he’s doing here with the music, passing off a composition that’s not his?”

  Jackie pulled a stool up in front of the island in the kitchen and sat down. “Have some breakfast, Adeena,” she said. “I made some carrot muffins. The ones you keep asking me to make all the time?”

  “You don’t care?”

  “I do. But I think you have to be smart about this. You’re going to lose your job if you’re not careful,” Jackie said. “Sit down, put something in your stomach. We’ll talk about it.”

  “Do you have any idea what that music means to me or who really wrote it?”

  Jackie rolled her eyes. Why did her daughter have to have such a penchant for melodrama? Okay Jackie, Psych 101. Listen. Repeat for understanding. She chose her words carefully. “This music is important to you. You don’t believe I understand where it came from?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, tell me then. Where did it come from, what does it mean,” she paused. “To you?”

  Adeena groaned. “Mom, I’m not
one of your patients at the hospital.”

  Jackie chuckled. “I’m sorry belle, you’re right.” She took a sip of her coffee, recalibrating her approach. “Maybe there is something you can do with your boss, about the music. I just don’t want to see you get hurt. You need to finally do what you’ve dreamed of your whole life. I don’t want to watch you mess this up.”

  “I know, I know,” Adeena exclaimed. She blew out her frustration with a sigh. “It’s just like what I was telling you and dad last night. When I play that music on the Duncan Cello, I . . .” She stopped, unable to finish her sentence.

  “Come here. Sit down beside me.” Jackie patted the stool beside her. Adeena dropped heavily down onto the stool and lowered her head towards her mother. Jackie put her hands on her shoulder and massaged her daughter’s tense muscles. “It’s going to be okay, belle. We’ll get through this, together.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” she replied, without lifting her head. “I just need someone, anyone, to believe me.”

  Jackie had heard that statement many times before. Some of her toughest cases went nowhere until the patient felt they had found someone who understood them, someone who believed the truth of what they were experiencing.

  “Adeena, I believe that what you told us last night is completely real to you. It’s like you and Katharine are the same person. And that cello and that music are some kind of, I don’t know, bridge that unites you somehow.”

  Adeena looked up, her mouth gaping open. “You believe me?”

  “Yes. You don’t understand how this could be happening and you need to make sense of it.”

  Adeena stared at Jackie, digesting what she just heard. “Wait, did you say ‘completely real to me’? You mean, it’s not actually real? It’s just real to me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Jackie sighed. “Adeena, what seems real to you, is real.”

  “Oh my God! You don’t believe me. You’re just playing doctor!”

  “Belle, I’m trying to help you make sense of all this,” Jackie replied. “Yeah, I’m a psychiatrist and I’ve seen this before. But, I’m your mother first.”

  “You’ve seen this before?” Adeena stood up, her tone rising in anger. “You’ve seen patients go back in time, and become another person? Wow! Thanks, Mom! Now I know I’m a fucked-up nut job, just like all your other crazies!”

  “They’re not ‘crazy’ and neither are you.”

  “You don’t get it. You’re just like Philippe,” Adeena exclaimed. She pointed to her bedroom door. “The cello in that room connects me to the past. Not just dreaming about it. Actually going back, becoming Katharine Carnegie, the woman who wrote the music that son-of-a-bitch is trying to claim he wrote. Katharine, who is falling in love with James Drummond, the Duke of Perth. The same Katharine that Grandma dreamt about for so many years. I am Katharine, or she is me, or …”

  Adeena hung her head. She put her hands to her face in frustration. “I don’t want any of this. I just want to be who I am. Whoever the hell that is. . .”

  DOCTOR BENJAMIN LOCHIEL had seen plenty of CT scans in his twenty-six years as a neurologist.

  The tools he used had evolved dramatically during his career. He felt like a pioneer some days as new techniques in X-ray computer tomography were unveiled at an ever accelerating pace. No sooner had he started to understand the latest breakthroughs, than he was called to attend yet another demonstration of an even better imaging technology.

  But the series of CT scans he was looking at now just didn’t make sense, it was unlike anything he had ever seen. Could it be the new tech he had started using had a bug? Something that would account for what he was seeing on his monitors?

  And now his colleague was spouting gibberish.

  “Say again?” Benjamin said, as he stared at his high-resolution monitor. Benjamin was on the phone with Dr. Raymond Chung, a neurological researcher from the University of Ottawa, who had helped develop the new CT imaging software. “I didn’t get that last part.”

  “This series of scans shows accelerated rates of neurogenesis from what I see,” Dr. Chung said.

  “Neurogenesis? New cells?”

  “Yes, like in a fetus, generating neurons from neural stem cells,” Dr. Chung explained. “At least that’s what I’m thinking, looking at these scans. I’ve been focusing my own research on this area. Adults have a steady rate of new cell generation, but I’ve never seen this rate of growth in anything but pre-natal brains.”

  Benjamin peered closely at the looping scan sequence on the monitor. He removed his glasses and magnified the resolution. “Hmmm,” he said. “Strangest thing, isn’t it?”

  “How old is this patient?” Dr. Chung inquired.

  “Just a sec,” Benjamin flipped through his charts. “Let me see here, uh … twenty-nine.”

  There was silence at the other end. “Interesting. I want to do some more work on this. I’ve never heard of this rate of generation in an adult before. I wonder…”

  Benjamin waited for him to continue. “Wonder, what?”

  “Dr. Lochiel I should come over and take a look for myself, make sure the system is calibrated correctly. And I also have a new test with a synthetic thymidine agent that we’re testing.”

  “Thanks. Let’s set something up for next week.”

  Benjamin hung up the phone and looked at the scan one more time.

  “You’ve got an amazing cerebrum, lady. An impossible, beautiful brain!”

  21

  WILLIAM FOUND HISTORY something of a guilty pleasure. There was always something new to discover if you kept poking at it.

  “Adeena, listen to this,” he called out to his daughter as she took a break from her perpetual music practices. She looked up from her iPhone.

  “What is it?”

  “The Drummond’s. They’re were always on the wrong side of things.”

  She smiled. “Dad, don’t tease me! What’d you find?”

  “You know I went to Drummond Castle looking to find the real story of James, Third Duke of Perth,” he said without looking away from his laptop.

  Adeena put her phone down and walked over to him. “What about him?”

  “Well we know he died trying to live up to everyone’s expectations. But really, his whole family always wanted a King they couldn’t have. Each generation kept trying to restore the Stuart line to the throne,” William said. “But it always failed. Spectacularly!”

  “Yeah, I read about the ‘45 - the Jacobite rising, and how bad that ended for them,” Adeena said, “especially James.”

  “You’re right,” William said. “But take a look at what happened in 1501, to his cousin Lady Margaret Drummond who was having breakfast with her two sisters one morning at Drummond Castle. Porridge apparently, was on the menu.”

  “Oh? I know exactly where she’d be eating it,” Adeena said. “I even know which dishes she’d use.”

  William looked at her thoughtfully. He wanted to believe everything she told him about becoming Katharine Carnegie, but he still couldn’t accept it. “Well, okay. But this was nasty porridge, laced with poison. Lady Margaret and her two sisters died after eating it.”

  “What? Who poisoned them?”

  “Good question. This is where it gets interesting. Lady Margaret Drummond was the King’s mistress, his true love they say, and there’s speculation they were secretly married. In any case, the King, James the Fourth, was very taken with her.”

  “Secretly married, why?”

  William took a sip from his tea before continuing. “Because, there was another Margaret the King was supposed to marry. He was betrothed to twelve-year-old Margaret Tudor, daughter of the King of England, Henry VII. The King of Scotland had no interest in her, even though the marriage arrangement was part of a peace treaty with England. He fell for Margaret Drummond, a commoner his own age.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Let’s see,” William did a quick calculation. “Both in their twenties. Margaret was tw
enty-six and the King, uh… twenty-eight.”

  “So she was poisoned at Drummond Castle,” Adeena said slowly, turning her head away. “Pity, such a beautiful place for music, and dancing and…”

  William studied his daughter lost in her thoughts, gazing out the window at the lake. “And what?”

  “Oh sorry. I was thinking about the gardens at the castle and how the moon lights them up so perfectly.”

  William recalled his own pleasure at seeing the ornamental gardens of Drummond Castle. “You saw them, at night?”

  “The night I danced with James.”

  “Drummond?”

  She nodded and held her gaze on William, waiting for his reaction. He remained silent, fighting his skepticism.

  “Finish your story dad.” Adeena said looking away. “Who poisoned Margaret Drummond?”

  He welcomed the diversion and turned back to his computer. “Nobody knows for sure. Legend has it that it was somebody who didn’t want a Drummond to become Queen, which would have screwed up the peace treaty with England.”

  “How did Margaret meet the King in the first place?”

  William chuckled. “You like the details, don’t you? Well, I spent way too much time getting sidetracked on this whole thing, but I did find a letter that says the King met her at Restalrig, a little village near Edinburgh. Quite the ladies man. They say he liked to pretend he was a commoner.”

  “Really? So what happened?”

  “Well, the King saw her at the fair they have in Restalrig every year, right near the huge church he attended each week. There were games and dances, and the two of them kept winning. He was taken with her, and apparently, she with him. She had no idea he was the King. But soon afterwards Margaret got pregnant and found out she was carrying a royal baby!”

  JAMES ADMIRED THE ruined Catholic church at Restalrig.

  Only two walls were left, both soaring high above the surrounding farmer’s fields. He could still see the intricate detail that formed the border of an inside window of the taller V-shaped wall rising eternally toward Heaven.