by Peter Hayes
“But turned out to be just another hustler from Croatia.”
She smiled wanly. “Not Croatia. But by then he had introduced me to Ibby and his gang.”
“Who were . . . ?”
“The oddest crew, I thought at first. Later, though, I really came to adore them.”
“Yes,” I said, “I can see from the photos.”
Vidya laughed with a sort of weary self-derision, then described to me how Ibrahim Saluk Habib—twenty-two years her senior—had courted and won her. “You must understand this: Indian families are extremely protective. I was brought up wrapped in a silk cocoon. At nineteen, I wasn’t permitted to go to a restaurant alone. It wasn’t until I went to Berne that I began to experience . . . other things.”
“Like?”
“Wine. European culture. Men. At first, it was a lark. A grand adventure. Ibby was smitten—with my title as much as by me, I think. We travelled all over: the Aegean, Monte Carlo, Amsterdam, Bali. There were private jets and spas and masses of servants and a constant stream of gifts: jewelry, cars, food and drink, entertainment and fine clothes. It was intoxicating. One day I’d be shopping in Nassau; the next, flying off to Telluride to ski. A fortnight later, we’d be in Maui, having a luau.”
Now it fell into place: the clothes, the serious jewels, the ardor and sophistication of our erotic encounters, the cigarettes and French inhaling, her international queenly style, hosting skills and hard, high polish. “But how did he afford it? Didn’t you wonder?”
“Ibby? Rich as Croesus. His business made astonishing sums. And he didn’t fancy paying taxes. That was another reason we were always on the go.”
“That, and to stay ahead of the police.”
“Police? Hardly! Ibby was a most respectable soul. Your own vice president, Mr. Bidenji, had us to lunch in Delaware. Another time, the president of Columbia . . .
“. . . University? Oh, you mean, Pictures?”
“. . . the country, held a fête in Ibby’s honor. Ibby wasn’t some common criminal.”
“Just an uncommon one.”
“Really, I don’t know why you’re saying that,” she said, petulantly.
“Vidya, the guy’s an arms dealer. A black marketeer! Didn’t you know that?”
“Arms dealer?” She didn’t seem disturbed. “I suppose he might have sold some arms. He bought and sold a lot of things. Anyway, your own country happens to be the biggest producer of guns and mis-syles in the world. Why do you produce them if you don’t want them sold?
“And as for smuggling, you’re more foolish than I imagined if you believe it entirely wicked. How do you think those of us living in underdeveloped countries acquire goods? If there were no smugglers, no one would have a color telly, VCR, perfume, soap, lipstick, CDs or even a bottle of mineral water! It’s fine for you to lecture us on the evils of black marketeering when you can go to ‘the mall,’ as you call it, and buy a dozen of anything you choose!”
“All right.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Later, I had an experience . . . that . . . made me see how few-tile incessantly feeding one’s appetites were. And . . . ultimately unfulfilling. So, I left.”
“With a chunk of Ibby’s cash.”
She looked irate. “Without a sou! I did take the jewels given as gifts, and my clothing—but they were mine, after all.”
“Yeah. You’d earned them.”
She let that pass.
Still, I pressed her. “And . . . ?”
“. . . I flew to Delhi and spent two months in Udaipur with my Lakshmi Auntie. I was there when she got a call from Jai’s family, who were seeking a suitable bride. I was twenty-seven, an old maid by their standards. They’d convinced themselves, I think, I would marry Ibby and when I didn’t they were shocked. They desperately wanted me to marry and by then I was not so deeply opposed. Anyway, I found Jai gallant and, more than that, humane. He was everything I believed a husband should be.” She paused. “Until I met you.”
“It’s not the pictures, Vidya. I’m not a prude. And you certainly have a right to your past. It’s that you lied to me. You’re not even Vidya! You’re Rukmini Patel!”
“I most certainly am not. Patel is the name I used to get out of Kenya. And I used it in Switzerland because I didn’t want it known I was there. Later, I found it useful. But when I left Ibby, Rukmini stayed behind.”
I shook my head. “Why didn’t you ever tell me all this?”
She paused for a moment. “Perhaps for the same reasons you never told me about that waitress in Boston you shagged in the loo while your date sat with Jai, eating clam chowder.”
“There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“None of my ex-lovers might have murdered your husband.”
“And you think Ibby did? That’s rich. If you’d ever met Ibby Habib, you’d know just how absurd that is.”
“What about his bodyguard? Big burly guy without a neck.”
She shook her head. “He’s capable of it, surely. But Bunzo does nothing on his own. And why on earth would Ibby hurt Jai?”
“Jealousy?”
“Flattering, but I hardly think so. Ibby had a string of women. There were a dozen young beauties in line behind me.”
“So you don’t think some character from this chapter of your life might have offed Jai.”
“No, I don’t. And if so, I can’t imagine who or why.”
“So that leaves us with some dirty pictures.”
“Yes. And your knowledge of my pahst, which isn’t as impeccable as you may have imagined.”
I considered this. “Did Jai know?”
“Oh, yes. He called me his ‘crimson woman.’ He said he’d sown wild oats himself, but it was so long ago, they’d all been eaten!”
“So who sent me those pictures?”
“I cahn’t say. But I’m glad they did.”
“You are? Why?” I asked, truly mystified.
“Because,” she said, after a moment’s consideration, “it’s a terrible thing to be loved for whom you’re not.”
Chapter 30
That evening the local paper announced a body found in a Wiltshire field by members of the Wiltshire Wings, a birdwatching club, had been identified as Henry Lewis Jones. As it was barely three days since the night of his killing, I worried about the condition of the corpse.
I went online but found nothing more. Other than the body’s identity, the police weren’t talking. Entering the search term “Wiltshire Wings” however, returned another story, also dated today, announcing the sighting of a rare “Indian White-backed Vulture” by members of the Wiltshire Wings “feeding in a Wiltshire field.”
It took me a moment to put the stories together, and to realize on what the bird had been feeding. At once, my hopes danced and flared. Then I thought, what was becoming of me, that such a grisly event could make me feel so happy?
I called and asked Strugnell if he could find out more.
“Not easily. They keep that stuff under lock and key. I’d have to have a bloody good reason. Anyway, I have my own problems. Palace wants to know when I’ll rule on the treasure. Even though it’s lost! And I can’t—can I?—’til I know who your bleedin’ Lady Albemarle is! And why the hell they buried her with it.”
“Look, it’s clearly ‘Treasure Trove.’ Whoever she is, she was sacrificed, and the treasure was buried as a sacrifice along with her. You don’t make the gods an offering intending to take it back.”
“Can you prove that?”
“No. But I will.”
“Who can?”
“Why don’t you ask Rumple?”
“Typical academic. Moves at the speed of shite. I need answers, Donne, and I need them now.”
“Christ,” I said, “you sound like my father.”
“Well, least you had one. Mine ran off when I was two.”
“And your Mum?”
“Ah! Died when I was young.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Wooland
.”
“Topped herself.”
Something thick and ill in his voice made me pause. He grunted. “Watching the telly, Lilly and me, when I noticed something out the corner of me eye.”
“What was it?”
“Mum. She’d set herself alight and was coming through the kitchen—not a word out of her, mind you.”
“Set herself on fire?”
“Doused herself with kerosene and struck a match.”
“While you were watching TV?”
He named the show.
“Jesus, Wooland, what did you do?”
“First . . . didn’t know what it was, did I? There were just these . . . flames. Then, through them, I recognized Mum.”
“Good God, man! What was she doing?”
“Burning. She passed behind us and went out to the porch.”
“. . . was she . . . screaming?”
“Not a word out of her,” he said almost proudly. “Not a peep. Outside she just sort of . . . folded. I remember trying to get near her and getting . . . fried.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I was only nine. Watched her. Burn. Patches of pink showing up through the char, and her hair—Mum had the most beautiful, curly red hair—flaring then powdering black ’til she was bald.”
“You watched her . . . die?”
“Oh, no. She lingered for a week and actually died of some infection.” He said this with the barest minimum of emotion, as if he were describing a pile of burning autumn leaves.
“Jesus, Wooland,” I said, aghast.
“Way I see it, Mum was in a load of pain. Only way out was to end it all.”
“Still, there are lots of ways to end it all, don’t you think?”
“She was a good Mum,” he said loyally.
I bit my tongue.
“May I make a suggestion? With all the nightmares you’ve been having, it might be a wise to see a shrink.”
“Why should I when I’ve got you?”
“Because I’m an anthropologist, Wooland.”
“Oh, I don’t need a shrink. Just a good jaw now and then. There!” he said, apparently knocking back a beer. He smacked his lips. “See?” he said, belching lightly. “Feeling better already.”
I asked that Willie keep an eye on Vidya, then walked across the downs. It wasn’t my conversation with Strugnell, but the one with Vidya that disturbed me. And it wasn’t the pictures. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the pictures. She, like us all, was entitled to her past. No, it was the feeling I was being played, and in ways I didn’t understand. And for a moment then, that shadowy tongue that had licked my heart before licked my heart again.
For I couldn’t seem to get my arms around Vidya, in any way but one. Every time I did, she morphed into something new.
Social hostess. Shell-shocked widow. Sexual temptress. Life saver. Faculty wife or gangster’s girl? Swinger or gunslinger? Social worker or cover-upper? Dear companion or codefendant?
Or, maybe, I thought, she’s just a complex, beautiful, fascinating woman, and as paradoxical as are we all. Yeah, that sounded closer to the truth.
I passed the stone circle. A field of gorse and heather descended to a cattle path that wended its way past the wishing pond. It glittered in the grayish light. Lost in thought, when I looked up again, my Lady’s grave was visible in the distance.
But her grave had been transformed: both desecrated and consecrated. “Nighthawks” with metal detectors had scoured the land for thirty, forty yards around, drilling scores of probe holes into the sod even while, on the edges of the cutting, there were a dozen memorial bouquets—including what looked like a hand-written prayer.
I turned from the grave to the bog in which it lay. In the rainy evening it was a melancholy station, a maze of streams and waving grasses brightened by loosestrife and overhung by silver willows. As I imbibed its desolation, a primal panic rose inside me. And I understood viscerally, then, why bogs were so long regarded as doorways to the underworld and the ideal sites for sacrifices—and how easily one could become disoriented here and, subsequently, lost or drowned.
So when a little old man came doddering down the track, I will admit I felt relieved.
He was, it turned out, the “grandfer” of Sam, the lad who’d first unburied my Lady. Rail thin and spry enough in a creaky sort of way, he clenched between his strong, stained molars the bitten stem of an unlit pipe. When I referred to his grandson’s find, he nodded: “Say Queen Abby’s buried here.”
“Queen Abby?”
“Good fairy, don’t you know? Used to bring her sickly wee ’uns. And barren wives would spend the nights where you’re a-settin’—sometimes even barren cows!”
“Who was she?”
“Agh!” He scratched his head with the stem of his pipe. “Fairy Queen. Lived in the pond down by the stones, ’til some saint or other made ’er shift. Me grammy said ye’d see ’er of a night on a pale horse, leading souls of those who would die on the morrow. That’s how she ken Rector Kingman was a goner. She’d zeed his ghost the night afore he died riding a pure white mare with Abby!”
Sensing he had my full attention, he went on: “Well, bein’ a ’ooman, even if a fairy one, but didn’t she fall in love? In order to wed, she took the form of a human queen. But her lad was betrothed to one Jessica Meeks who, despite her name, was anything but. Declaring she would not be cuckolded by any heathenish fey, she learned from her lover boy where he was a-meetin’ Abby. Then when Abby did appear, the girl’s Da and brothers caught her in a net.
“Well, didn’t they have the fight of their lives, as Abby took on one hundred shapes: tiger, camel, pizen sarpent, she-bear and giant coney! Holy water was sprinkled on her. It smoked and hissed and burned her flesh like tanner’s acid until at last, scarched and exhausted, she came back home to her original form: that of a beautiful, black-haired ‘ooman in whose dark heart the light of Christ never has entered once—nor will!” He paused for dramatic effect and breath.
“Now, bein’ immortal, she could na be slain and so she was buried, staked to the bog with golden pins. Bound like that, she’s prey to fiends who ravish her cruelly night after night. And so, ’tis said, if you walk the downs when the moon is nil, you can sometimes hear her moan with pleasure, even as she weeps in loneliness and shame.”
Trying to hide my fascination, I said, “And her name, you say, was Good Queen Abby?”
He fitted the unlit pipe in his teeth. “Good Queen Abby, yis t’was.”
“And did people ever make her offerings?”
“Na me. But me Grammy did.”
“Really! And how did she do that?”
“How?” He glared at me like I was daft. “Tossed ’em in the bog. Even offered up her watch, Grammy did. Barkin’ mad, volks said she is. It’s when we thought Da ha’ been killed in the war.”
“What war?”
“Why, the Great One. Later, we heard he was guest of the kaiser, and the Boches eventually did let him go. So you zee,” he winked, “maybe old Abby done the trick.”
I thanked him warmly for his reminiscences, and asked if he’d ever seen Abby himself.
“Abby. Pookas. Boneless Ned. And a black dog once, with eyes like barnin’ coals!”
“Really?” I said. “And what did it do?”
“Well, he give me an evil, thievin’ look, now didn’t he?” Then he sucked on his pipe, jerked at his cap, and as if he’d thought better about speaking of such matters, marched straight off without another word.
I was almost certain now that the legend of Good Queen Abby held a distant memory of Lady Albemarle. Just as peat and sphagnum moss had formed around my Lady’s body, so other myths had conflated her own until she had blurred in the minds of the folk with the Fairy Queen and primordial Mother. Everything was falling into place.
And moving to her grave, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Around the margins of the hole, the peat was a different hue and texture. That is, it was peat
laid down at a different time than the peat that was surrounding it.
I hurried home, looking for a quote I had kept for future reference, though it took me some minutes before I could find it:
While bodily incorruptibility was associated with sainthood in Russia, on the continent and England it was generally regarded as proof of vampirism. Such bodies, whether disinterred by accident or design, were often burnt or staked . . .
There it was! Three hundred fifty years ago, by “accident or design,” someone had unburied my Lady! And given the times—the Puritans were in power and witchcraft trials at an all-time high—her perfect, unspoiled, undead corpse was surely thought to be immortal, a vampire sleeping in the bog by day and rising to stalk the country by night. And so, that day she was first uncovered, no one had suggested preserving her in some museum. Instead, a blade of dread had stabbed the parish. Persuaded by the Puritan clergy and divines, they had removed her heart and reburied her, staking down her wandering spirit with wooden crooks and hand-carved curses—even as the common folk (the uninterrupted chain of artifacts showed) continued their offerings as they had for centuries.
For, when a cow was lost or a loved one dying, it wasn’t to the chapel of the saint the simple folk turned—but to their Lady. There, in the dusk or dawn or midnight, with witnesses none but the wheeling stars, they made their sacred pacts and pleadings and offered up their secret prayers.
Still, there was one nagging question. If the runes were carved in the seventeenth century, why—ingesusnam—was their form and English so damned old?
But the answer to that was simple enough: the inscription was traditional, with Jesus only the last in a long list of gods in whose name it had been uttered, and Albemarle the latest in a long line of fiends. For in sacred formulas, archaic words and language endure, so that to this day good Christians pray, “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .”
It was Strugnell calling. “Book you found? Wasn’t part of the treasure. Lads unearthed it, wrapped in silk. Tossed it on the hoard.”
“How very scientific of them. Have they never heard of strata?”
“Course not.”