The Burning Glass

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Alasdair walked on a few more steps, until his back-of-the-head sensors realized she was no longer behind him. He spun around. “A toehold in reality, you’re saying?”

  “Well, yeah. But the cross on Isabel’s gravestone. It’s a cross patte, a Templar cross.”

  “Oh aye, Ciara was going on about that.”

  “Of course.” Jean hurried on down the path. “It’s a great story. When the pope and the king of France discredited and murdered the Templars, a bunch of them packed up their treasures and came here to Scotland, where Robert the Bruce was glad to have them—he was on the outs with the pope right then anyway. Supposedly, those Templars turned the tide for Scotland at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. And there might be some sort of connection between the Templars and Scottish freemasonry.”

  “That’s as may be, but the rest of the tales, the underground societies and religious conspiracies persisting through history, when most people cannot keep a secret for five minutes . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. One thing, though.” Jean followed Alasdair onto the terrace just as a ray of sun shot down between the clouds, making her feel she’d stepped into a spotlight. Perfect timing. “Why would Isabel be buried beneath a cross patte? I mean, her ancestors were up to their armored necks in Templar business, but Isabel died in 1569, two hundred and fifty years after the Templar order was disbanded.”

  “How many ways are there of forming a cross?” Alasdair retorted. “The Nazi’s Iron Cross is the same design. Does that mean the Sinclairs were Nazis?”

  “And a swastika figure is a good-luck symbol in Buddhism. Yeah, I know that, too. It’s just that it’s highly entertaining to watch the storyteller waltz with the historian.”

  Alasdair snorted something under his breath, words which Jean could fill in for herself. Now that she’d met Ciara, she understood all the better why he’d decided to sit this one out, thank you, and leave the floor to the less inhibited. Or the more ignorant, as the case might be.

  There was the grotto, a stone cavity with an arched roof backed into the hillside. Jean bent over to look inside. The holy water was contained less in a well than a pool, fed by a stone trough clogged with an entire civilization of moss and lichen. A trickle of water still dripped disconsolately into a basin with the square footage of a bathtub. No doubt the afflicted would have immersed themselves in it, with all appropriate supplications, of course. Now the water was dark and turgid, dead leaves floating on top and a few modern coins glimmering faintly about twelve inches down. She was not moved to insert any body parts into it—especially not the ones that happened to be sore right now. Whatever sanctity the well had once had was now gone, replaced with the less fraught concept of “good luck,” although Jean suspected it was the believers who brought both sanctity and luck to begin with.

  Wondering just what Ciara and Keith planned to do with it—turn it into a hot tub?—she backed out of the grotto and looked over the far edge of the terrace, to a relatively flat field overgrown with nettles, thistles, loosestrife, willowherb, foxglove, and other leafy unnamables. Butterflies wafted about. A path or two meandered between barely visible tumbles of worked stone—the remains of the hospice, no doubt. Usually monastery buildings were south of the church, to catch the sun, but there were exceptions. Ferniebank was obviously one of them, the plan of the structure dictated by the site of the ancient well and the lay of the land along the river.

  Like the castle, the derelict chapel grounds were romantic, in the Shelley-Keats-Byron sense of the word. Picturesque. Something to spark a bittersweet sigh just before tea time, so the cuppa and the scone would go down all the better.

  As for the chapel itself . . . Jean looked around. Wordlessly, Alasdair gestured toward the roughly truncated walls. These pinnacled buttresses were less assertive than Rosslyn’s, but were still lavishly sculpted with dragons and other less fantastic animals. Jean headed toward the round-headed doorway but was diverted by a freestanding informational plaque the size of her office desktop and helpfully tilted at a forty-five-degree angle.

  Like the flat, the plaque was not new. Its plastic cover was warped, the message beneath faded by the sun and stained by leaking rain. But a quick and dirty history of Ferniebank was legible enough, names and dates and Isabel’s story illustrated by a drawing of the keep with smoke flowing from an upper window while appropriately garbed people gesticulated below. Other drawings—both more skilled and more generic than Wallace’s—showed the chapel under reconstruction and hooded monks offering medicinal brews to reclining and no doubt declining patients.

  Another ray of sun glanced through the clouds, reflecting off the surface of the plastic so brightly that Jean winced. Ah, this was the rippling glint of light she’d seen from the bedroom window yesterday afternoon, thinking at first it was a fire. From her angle it had seemed to come from inside the chapel. She’d seen the plaque reflecting headlights last night, too.

  Jean stepped through the doorway. The interior of the chapel wasn’t much larger than the castle’s High Hall and was paved with lichen-mortared flagstones. A double line of pillars, four to a side, led toward the empty chancel. They were wrapped with stone tendrils that looked as though they had grown up out of the earth and then petrified. The broken bits of vaulting at their tops were frenzies of ornament: fruit, leaves, flowers, human figures and faces—some with skin attached and some as bones—stars, musical instruments including several harps, and multitudes of protruding geometrical shapes like stony vertebrae. More botanical garlands encrusted the window frames.

  Her breath escaped in a whistle. No photo she’d seen, and certainly not her distant inspection from the window, had fully revealed the glories of Ferniebank Chapel. Oh yes, the carvings were in the same style, perhaps from the same hands, as those at the much better known Rosslyn. How sad that these were worn and stained by dripping water and splotched with yellow, white, and black fungus.

  “Supposedly,” said Alasdair at her side, “you’ve got the Seven Deadly Sins, the signs of the zodiac, an entire family of green men, who knows what all. Interpretation’s at your own risk.”

  Jean looked up at the sky, or what she could see of it between clouds. “I’d sure like to have seen the ceiling. Arches, vaults, pendant bosses—the works, right?”

  “There are drawings in the book, Gerald’s and earlier ones as well.”

  “The roof didn’t collapse until the 1890s, right? Never mind religion, reform, depopulation, whatever—if it hadn’t lasted that long, most of these sculptures would have wasted away long since.” Jean imagined the interior of the chapel as it had once been, in the light of candles, the dark gray stone gleaming, the carvings such intricate patterns of light and shadow that they would have seemed to move. They would have seemed to worship. “You have to wonder what was going on in William Saint Clair’s mind. Or the minds of his masons, more accurately. This sort of over-the-top decoration was unique in Scotland even before the Reformation, let alone after. And neither Ferniebank nor Rosslyn was destroyed by the Protestants.”

  “Giving ammunition to the conspiracy mongers,” Alasdair said.

  “Yeah.” Jean looked back over her shoulder. The severe top of the castle rose above the trees, a typical border keep, matter-of-fact, dour, and doughty at once. Masculine to the chapel’s femininity.

  Alasdair was walking toward the chancel, where the building narrowed into a square extension, the holy of holies. Jean picked her way respectfully among the various commemorative stones that marked the graves of the movers and shakers of their times, and paused beside one set into the wall beside the sumptuously carved but harshly decapitated arch separating the two parts of the building. The inscription was almost illegible. “Henricus Sinncler,” she read aloud. “Chip, smudge, naut, chip, adie, another chip, and MCD. That’s 1400. But that was before this chapel was rebuilt, wasn’t it? Was this particular Henry left over from the earlier building? A relative deserving a memorial stone? ”

  Silence, except for the
wind in the trees and the murmur of flowing water. Jean walked on through the archway. Alasdair was standing straight and still as a prehistoric monolith. “Alasdair?”

  “It’s gone,” he said, each word a hailstone shattering on the pavement below.

  “What?” She looked down at the tips of his shoes, pointing toward a rectangular slab of a different color and texture than the surrounding flagstones, its edges hinting at a rosy blush despite its age. But the central part of its surface was a raw red the color of dried blood, scored with parallel ridges, sharp and unweathered. Jean felt the certainty fall through her chest and into her stomach like a rock into a well. “This is Isabel’s gravestone?”

  “It was. The inscription’s been chiseled clean away, and all the bits gathered up. It’s not been vandalized, it’s been stolen.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Erupting with an emphatic “Damn and blast!” Alasdair lunged for the door.

  No! Jean stumbled, found her feet, and sprinted behind him as he double-timed it out of the chapel, over the terrace, up the path. No! The antiquity violated, and Alasdair too—he’d barely been here for twenty-four hours—it wasn’t fair!

  Someone could have taken the inscription at any time during the ten days when Ferniebank had no caretaker, but no, the thieves came last night. Was that coincidence, too? There were too damn many coincidences.

  And she stumbled again, the second certainty punching her in the gut. She thought she’d seen lights last night, and she hadn’t told him.

  He catapulted into the courtyard, headed for the flat—P.C. Logan and yet another APB, you get the clarsach back and you lose the inscription—a harp was one thing, a stone jigsaw puzzle was another . . . Jean ran out of the trees and stopped dead beside her car.

  The Mystic Scotland van was idling outside the gate. The courtesy gate—now it was Ciara who was turning a key in its lock and pushing it open. Jean looked around at Alasdair. He had halted so abruptly the gravel banked up around his feet. Not fair, they’re piling on!

  Ciara climbed back into the van, drove it into the courtyard, stopped. The doors opened and half a dozen tourists decanted themselves and raised their cameras. What, Jean asked herself, had she been thinking about a three-ring circus?

  Ciara was still sitting in the van, talking to a man wearing a cloth cap, its small bill low over brushy eyebrows. As if sensing Jean’s gaze on him, he glanced around. Through the reflections of light and shadow on the window, like glints from a disco ball, she saw muddy eyes set close together in a long, almost convex face that flared outward along the jaw. His skin was such a pasty white that his emergent moustache, little more than fuzz gone to seed, looked like a smear of dirt between lengthy nose and lipless mouth.

  Dismissing Jean, he leaned toward Ciara as though making some plea. After a long, frozen moment, Ciara laughed in his face. If that wasn’t an up-yours rejection of his statement, albeit delivered in Ciara’s own unique way, Jean had never seen one.

  The woman leaped from the van. The man exited the vehicle much more slowly, almost tripping himself up on the doorframe and landing on the gravel with a thud. “The castle’s not yet open for business,” Alasdair called, his stance that of a fighter poised to break from his corner.

  Ciara aimed a flounce at him, a gesture made more effective by her billowing skirt and pink fun-fur jacket. Her matching pink lips turned up in something that was neither a smile nor a snarl. “Give it a rest, Alasdair. Even you cannot say I’m bending the rules.”

  “Away with you then, and good luck to you if you’re expecting to see Isabel’s gravestone.” Alasdair pivoted and strode on toward the flat.

  Ciara brushed by Jean, her face puckered with puzzlement, not resentment. Jean knew her own poker face fell woefully short of Alasdair’s professional version, but she gave it her best.

  The erstwhile Mrs. Cameron—or did she ever take his name?—herded her flock onto the path. Her tall, lanky companion shambled along behind, his tweed country-squire suit and tie standing out from the casual windbreakers and jeans of the others. Jean would have found the contrast amusing, if she’d had an amused bone in her body just then.

  “. . . chapel sculptures are pagan, occult, and alchemical, marking the azimuths of sacred sites throughout Europe which were erected atop ancient Druidic holy places,” Ciara was telling her acolytes. “Ferniebank’s playing as significant a role in the underground stream of knowledge as Rosslyn, well-known for its ancient secrets—Grail legends and Templar mysteries. Remember now, Marie of Guise, Mary Queen of Scots’ mother, wrote to Lord William Saint Clair vowing eternal gratitude for his showing her the great secret at Rosslyn. And Isabel Sinclair here at Ferniebank played the ancient clarsach for Queen Mary, therefore . . .” Ciara’s voice faded away.

  Therefore two and two make seventeen, Jean finished for her. Although Ciara’s mathematical abilities were not the issue, not when she was successfully running a business, whether it was founded on moonshine or not. No, the issue was standing on the front porch of the flat, one hand grasping the railing so hard his knuckles were stark white.

  As Jean mounted the steps beside him, she sensed his laser-like gaze skimming her shoulder, aimed at the now-empty path. His flash of anger was buried so deeply under that polar ice-cap he could don at will, she couldn’t believe he’d actually grinned, even laughed, such a short time ago, let alone . . . Well, what could she expect? Of course he’d default to the same Alasdair she’d first met.

  What she did expect was for him to say again that Ciara had caused some changes here, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. He opened the door and stood aside while Jean stepped into the flat. Then he shut the door behind them both and headed for his official P and S envelope. He was going to have to tell them about the theft, that it happened on his watch, that he hadn’t heard or seen a thing. Some caretaker he was. Some chief of security.

  Jean slumped against the kitchen cabinet, feeling every bit as boneless as Dougie, who was still in his chair, sleeping the sleep of the virtuous.

  If she didn’t tell Alasdair, if she just kept her mouth shut, would that be the equivalent of lying to him? He needed all the evidence he could get that, yes, something was wrong here, badly wrong, whether anyone had died because of it or not. And yet she didn’t have any evidence to offer, not really.

  Get it over with. “Alasdair, I thought I saw something near the chapel last night. I thought I saw lights, maybe. But when I took a good look, I didn’t see a thing. So I decided I was wrong. And the lights I saw later on, I’m sure they were headlights from the road across the river.”

  He put the envelope back down. He turned toward her. “You saw something? Lights? When?”

  “When I went outside to lock my car. And later on, in the bedroom window, from the corner of my eye, just for a second.”

  “You didn’t tell me.” His voice was flat as road kill.

  “But I didn’t actually see anything. If I had, I’d have told you, and you’d have gone out and searched up and down and . . .” She was just making it worse by sounding possessive.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It never occurred to me. You said yourself we had a bit of an appetite last night.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “I didn’t think I saw anything!”

  “That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?”

  Oh yes, the same cold, crisp, take-charge, arrogant Alasdair she’d first met. “Don’t talk to me like I’m some wet-behind-the-ears detective constable.”

  “Even the rawest recruit would have known to make a report. And I’d have told you that you cannot see headlamps from the road across the river, because it runs behind the hill.”

  Shit. She’d thought she’d seen an ice sheet covering his expression. She was wrong. His face was cold as an alien moon cut by frigid crevasses opening onto . . . Not onto nothingness. It was only because she knew him so well, after all, that she could see the disappointment flickering in t
hose depths, disappointment and anger and even, horribly, fear.

  Instead of saying, You were right, now that I’ve broken your shell, I don’t like everything that’s inside, she turned away.

  “It’s going on for noon,” he said. “The castle needs opening. You’ve got an appointment.”

  “Right.” She didn’t trust her voice to say anything more. She grabbed her backpack and sprinted out to her car, the gravel cracking beneath her feet. By rote she snapped the catch on her seat belt, turned the key in the ignition, drove across the courtyard, and turned onto the road.

  A blast from a horn slapped her back to her surroundings. She hadn’t looked one way, let alone both, and the driver of a mud-splashed blue car behind her had had to brake. Fortunately—she, Jean saw, recognizing the abbreviated blond hair of Valerie Trotter—had been driving as slowly as the narrow, winding road demanded. Jean pulled into a layby just beyond the end of the perimeter wall and waved contritely as Valerie accelerated around her. She returned the wave with a gesture that might have been dismissive but was not, at least, obscene.

  Assuming neither Hector nor Jackie was flattened on her grille, Jean pulled out onto the road again. In her viscera she felt the cold vacuum of space, so strong she expected to see the perimeter wall break up and its component stones spiral toward her. She expected to see the outbuildings at Ferniebank Farm collapse and fall, and Roddy himself—there he was, oblivious to her distress, taking long strides across the yard—sucked into her black hole. She expected trees to shatter into kindling and the river itself rise from its bed in great globules of water.

  Alasdair Cameron asked no quarter, and he offered none. His anger and disappointment were justified. Not the way he chose to express it, slamming his drawbridge in her face like that—especially after last night. But it was justified. Her instincts had nagged her about those lights, but no, in one moment of cavalier dismissal, she’d betrayed his confidence in her. In the cases they’d worked together, she had never had the power to make him fail. And now she did. In the end, though, in whatever end, he wouldn’t blame her. He’d blame himself.