“Elaine,” Rebecca told Michael, “said something about that Virginia dig. Jerry’s still blaming Laurel Matheny. There’s no crime worse than excavating and therefore destroying a site without publishing accurate results.”
“You’re tellin’ me? Historians are the first victims!”
“Are you going to tell him about the Bruce’s heart?”
“He might already know. Maybe I’ll wait until he tells me. That’d be most instructive.”
Rebecca knew Michael’s look of deliberate insolence, and didn’t comment. “You’d like to find it yourself, wouldn’t you?”
“Robert the Bruce is as important to the Scottish psyche as a football team that beats an English one,” Michael told her.
Adele and Hilary were talking quietly. Elaine sulked. Tony stood, brushed off the seat of his jeans, disappeared into the rain, and returned with a Nikon that had so many attachments Rebecca wondered if it could also gauge barometric pressure. He started by shooting Michael and Rebecca where they sat a discreet foot apart. Obligingly, they smiled. Tony assured them, “We’ll have a proper rogues’ gallery.”
“Anne Douglas was tried for witchcraft in 1545,” Jerry said. “Supposedly she still haunts the place. That’s the kind of story that catches the public imagination.” Adele turned abruptly away from Hilary and focused on Jerry. Michael and Rebecca exchanged a meaningful glance.
“Probably Anne was simply stubborn about handing over the priory treasury,” said Sheila.
“But there’s no evidence the priory treasury had anything to do with the accusations of witchcraft,” said Michael.
Every face turned toward him. Sheila registered Rebecca’s proximity. Her mouth straightened in a thin, malicious smile.
She doesn’t really exist, Rebecca told herself. She’s just an evil genie, and will vanish in a puff of smoke. She said, “Anne’s trial could have been either political expediency or simple greed. Henry VIII was trying to force the Scottish government to give him the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, for his son Edward. The Rough Wooing, they called the ensuing English invasion. This was the area that took the brunt of it. Rudesburn, Melrose, Abbey St. Bathans—they were all looted.”
“But Mike,” Jerry returned as if Rebecca hadn’t spoken, “wouldn’t it be fun to prove that there was a treasure involved? Talk about a good story!”
“Not Mike,” purred Sheila. “He prefers Michael. Trust me.”
“Oh?” Jerry seemed to think that fact was the most interesting thing he’d heard all day. Mark looked around. Dennis remained focused on Jerry.
Rebecca couldn’t tell if Michael flushed or whether the damp chill of the day had simply made his cheeks rosier than usual. He heaved himself to his feet and walked out of the church, his steps elaborately unconcerned. Rebecca told herself that pulling out several handfuls of blond perm wouldn’t help. She thanked Nora and Bridget, and followed Michael.
He stood in the mist, his hands in his pockets, looking across the stream toward the village. “Did Colin say something about a treasure?” he asked Rebecca.
“Yeah, that Sheila’s film is going to be about buried treasure as well as ghosts. Of course, the two go together in the popular imagination, as Jerry would be the first to point out.”
“Kleinfelter’s a pro. He’d no be confusin’ treasure in the form of historical relics with real monetary treasure. Would he?”
“Good question.” Rebecca cocked her head to the side. His face was tight and closed, and she couldn’t read it. Then the others trooped out of the church and picked up shovels, and she didn’t have time to think about it.
Every now and then during the morning, the mist thickened into rain, but after lunch and a welcome hour in the warm kitchen, the mist lifted, and by late afternoon the clouds had become huge fluffy galleons in a deep blue sky.
By six o’clock Michael and Rebecca remained in sole possession of the field. The dark brown stripes of shallow trenches scarred the cloister garth and the lawn. Where they passed over the ruined walls, the sharp edges of cut stone shouldered aside the earth.
In the village, a dog barked. The Plantagenet Productions van pulled into the Craft Centre parking lot, and stopped beside the silver Jaguar. Tony got out, locked up, and saw Michael and Rebecca standing by the church. He waved cheerily and went into the Hotel.
Rebecca asked, “Do you suppose he’s fallen into Sheila’s web, too?”
“I imagine she keeps him on like you’d keep a spare tire in the boot,” Michael replied. “The woman’d tease a broomstick if it were wearin’ trousers.”
“If she delivers on her promises, she’s no tease. Just to fit in with the medieval mythology of the place, I’d call her a succubus.”
Michael reached out his arm and pulled her close. His coat was wet and cold, but she could sense the warmth of his body beneath. She thought he was actually going to say he was sorry about Sheila. But no, he’d already told her he wouldn’t apologize. He gives no quarter, she told herself, and expects none. She’d liked that integrity from the beginning.
“I’m sorry you had to see her,” was what he said, “particularly when we’re courtin’ wi’ intent to commit matrimony. She’s no a patch on you.”
“I’m glad you noticed.” Rebecca smiled against his shoulder. How considerate, to reassure her. Like an arrow through her breast, she thought, he’s taking for granted we’re going to marry.
“Hey, Rebecca!” called Dennis from the back step of the cottage. “You’re cooking tonight!”
“Coming!” Rebecca shouted, and let her momentary qualm dissipate into the cool evening air and the steady clasp of Michael’s arm.
It was when they were halfway across the footbridge that they heard the music. Not specific words, just the murmur echoing in the empty church, the slow rise and fall of Gregorian plainsong chanted by women’s voices.
“Is the RDG providing special effects?” Rebecca asked.
“No,” replied Michael, his voice thin. “I heard the singin’ when I was here before. It’s no special effects.”
The hair rose slightly on the back of Rebecca’s neck. “Oh. I see.” Together they sped across the bridge.
1
Chapter Six
Despite the fire crackling in the sitting room and the telly emitting the cultured drone of a BBC documentary, the students gravitated to the kitchen. No wonder, when the aroma of coffee mingled with that of the chocolate chunk cookies Dennis had just pulled out of the oven.
“My sister taught me how to cook,” he said as he scooped the warm, sweet morsels into various clutching hands. “She’d stand there making sure I leveled off every measuring cup and sifted the flour and soda together.”
“Aye, sisters are tidy creatures.” Michael took his cookies and his mug of coffee into the dining room, where he proceeded to pile the table with papers and cardboard boxes.
“Did you get the sheep properly domesticated?” Rebecca asked Adele, and offered her a cookie.
“‘The Taming of the Ewe’?” Adele returned, taking only one. “Very interesting documentary. Pointed up the innate relationship between animals and man. Like in the book The Way of the Animal Powers… .”
After ten days on the dig they’d learned to indulge Adele’s eccentricities. She was even-tempered about them, without the annoying zeal of an evangelist, and had turned out some superb meals besides.
“Here’s looking at ewe, kid,” said Mark. He handed a cookie to Hilary and took one for himself.
Rebecca and Hilary groaned appreciatively. Adele didn’t react. Dennis’s mouth was too full to speak.
The students carried plates and mugs into the sitting room while Rebecca took the cookie sheets to join the dinner dishes. She enjoyed washing up; it was a pleasantly mindless activity leading to a minor but still satisfying accomplishment.
The dining room window overlooked the hotel, the Craft Centre, the shop and the bridge, a stage set across which moved cars, farm trucks, and the Johnston childre
n on their skateboard. From the kitchen Rebecca could see the priory standing aloof from the trenches cut across its lawns. A ray of sun glinted suddenly from the west, and the shadow of the cottage stretched across the Gowan. As if a light had been switched on within its stones, the priory was illuminated against its backdrop of cloud. Too much depth to be a stage set, Rebecca mused. It was more like an oil painting, something by Burne-Jones, a scene of murder and pillage made romantic by gilded sentiment.
Evening was falling early tonight. The showers of the last few days had come and gone, moistening the ground just enough to make it workable. But the thick greenish-gray clouds now building up in the east presaged heavy rain. Rain would flood the trenches and break down the vertical planes of their sides that Jerry, with plumb bob and trowel, had been at such pains to cut. He’d taken the precaution of leaving the working surfaces covered with polythene sheets, and the blue plastic fluttered in the gusty wind.
The yew tree in the cemetery stirred. Something glinted white behind its dark branches. Rebecca leaned across the sink, squinting.
“The ghost of Anne Douglas,” said Adele at her shoulder, and Rebecca jumped out of her skin. She turned, saw Mark and Michael looking curiously in from the dining room, and said, “Just a trick of the light, Adele.”
“There are no such things as ghosts,” added Mark.
“As much as I hate to admit it,” Michael said, “some places do have what, for lack of a better word, we call ghosts.”
Adele smiled at him, welcoming the prodigal son. Mark still looked skeptical. The ray of sun winked out, and the image of the priory in the window became an old photograph faded into indifference.
Rebecca wiped off the sink and dried her hands. Anne Douglas. Who was she, what was she, what had happened to her? Enough questions clung to her name to make a legion of dead sleep uneasily. Odd, how the saintly Marjory seemed less genuine, less vital, than the ambiguous Anne. Rebecca didn’t even know if the two women were related.
Adele said to Mark, “We’ve all smelled candle wax in the church when no candles were there. We’ve heard the voices singing. We’ve seen the cats bristling at nothing.”
“Well, yeah, I keep looking for the tape decks and the speakers, and there aren’t any,” Mark admitted. “But it’s not what you sense, it’s what your imagination makes out of the sensory input. Like looking at an optical illusion. People see ghosts, or the Loch Ness monster, or whatever, because they believe in them, not the other way around.”
“I grew up in Inverness,” said Michael. “I never saw anything in the loch, but I’ve met those who swear they have. It’s faith.”
“And income from tourists.”
“Don’t be so cynical.” Rebecca sat down, glancing up at Mark where he leaned against the door. “Even if you don’t have much faith, you have to admit faith is an important force. The ghost of Anne Douglas is the Rudesburners’ Nessie—a mascot, enough to tickle you up but not enough to threaten.”
Mark nodded. “You’ve got a point there.”
“The faithful have always prayed to relics,” said Adele, “drawn by their power. And those who scoffed at relics were cursed by them. Look at King Sweyn in England, killed for doubting St. Edmund.”
“Wonder if that has anything to do with the supposed curse of Rudesburn,” Rebecca wondered. “Some critical mass of relics and reformation?”
No one ventured an opinion. From the sitting room came the canned chuckles of a sitcom. “Oh no!” wailed Dennis, and Hilary laughed. It was a shame she laughed so infrequently; her laughter was unforced, as natural as the Gowan giggling over its rocks and willow branches.
Mark moved backward toward the sitting room, the male particle attracted by the female nucleus. “Adele,” he said over his shoulder, “you and Jerry are a lot alike. You both enjoy a good story.” And, from the sitting room, “Hey, Hilary, what’s so funny?”
Adele, looking quizzical, followed. Michael and Rebecca eyed each other across the printouts and artifacts. “Hello, stranger,” she said.
“The morn is Friday,” he returned. “Speakin’ of Inverness, my mother invited us to spend the weekend wi’ them.”
Rebecca’s gaze plummeted to the table. Several shards of pottery lay in one box, a lead pilgrim’s badge with a crude representation of a woman’s face in another. In a bed of cotton batting lay a splendid gold ring brooch, formed of six finely worked dragons in relief, still encrusted with bits of dirt. She asked Michael, “Wouldn’t it be rather crowded?”
“My parents run a hotel, love. They have plenty of room.”
“The same room?” She looked up from under her brows.
He smiled patiently. “When Geoff and Maddy were engaged, they gave them the same room. They’re no goin’ to be hypocritical.”
Her eyes fell again. Their relationship had become distressingly public. More than once she’d had to traipse through the kitchen with Michael’s fingerprints as obvious as a measles rash on her skin. His parents, made of gentler stuff than hers, might well smile fondly at the sound of bedsprings creaking, envisioning rings of both the wedding and the teething variety. “Maybe we should stay here, especially since we came back last Sunday to find someone had been poking around in the dig.”
“Grant said he’d keep an eye on the place, although noo that we’re findin’ gold… .” Michael looked at the brooch. “Do you no want to meet my mum and dad just yet, then?”
“Not just yet, if you don’t mind. Not that I don’t want to meet them,” she added hastily, “there’s just so much going on, so many pressures… .”
“I understand. Dinna worry yoursel’.” His eyes met hers, faintly puzzled, but not hurt. He looked at her with such indulgent affection that what she felt was less guilt than irritation.
Flustered, Rebecca picked up the brooch. The metal was cold and heavy in her hand, but the artifact said nothing to her. She closed her eyes, smoothed her mind, cautiously bent her thoughts toward it. Maybe she sensed a faint resonance, like a tingle in the metal. Maybe not. She looked up. “Are these artifacts less charged than the ones at Dun Iain were, or have we simply developed immunities?”
“I’ve wondered that mysel’. It could have something to do with the objects at Dun Iain bein’ so far from their home.”
“Or that we’ve become cautious, less sensitive, in our old age. Not surprising.” Michael snorted, whether in agreement or protest she couldn’t tell. She turned the brooch, watching the light shimmy along the intricate curves of the dragons’ bodies. “Fifteenth century?”
“Probably fourteenth. No tellin’ when it was lost, though. Those brooches were family heirlooms.”
The label on the back of the brooch was half peeled away; the damp earth had dried and turned grainy. Rebecca tried to stick it down and succeeded only in pulling it off. The glint of gold was scratched… . She held it to the light. “Michael, look. There’s an inscription.”
He took the brooch from her hand, picked up a cloth, and rubbed. “Ave Maria Gracia Plena. A.D.”
“Anno Domini? Does it give a year?”
“No year.”
“What if the initials stand for Anne Douglas? What if it was hers?” For a moment Rebecca was rapt by the idea. Then her face fell. “Would she have had something this—well, secular?”
“Secularity was her problem. But there’s no way of provin’ it was hers or anyone’s.” Michael laid the artifact in its box, sorted through the printouts until he found its record sheet, and filled in the inscription. Adele strolled by, murmured something about reading, and went upstairs.
“Ave Maria Gracia Plena,” repeated Rebecca, half to herself. “Hail Mary, full of grace. The angel’s greeting at the Annunciation, telling Mary she would be the mother of the Messiah. The Priory church was dedicated to Mary, ‘Our Lady’, and nuns consider themselves brides of Christ.”
“Aye?”
“Oh nothing, really. Just one of those philosophical dichotomies, worshipping pregnancy but scorning th
e act that causes pregnancy. I guess because it doesn’t always cause pregnancy, because there’s room for so much pleasure and pain as well.”
“Do you mind Robert Graves’s poem aboot the Christian nuns? They watch fish circlin’ in their chaste and chilly pool and remember that pagan nuns were often temple prostitutes. Though prostitution’s no the correct concept. That’s just it, sex is sacred and profane both… .”
Hilary stood in the doorway, eyes wide. She hurried through the room. Her dishes clinked into the sink, and her footsteps tapped briskly up the stairs. Michael leaned across the table. “Was it something I said?”
“Maybe she gets her mouth soaped for speaking that honestly. My mother never admitted sex existed. I had to pump my brothers for information.”
Michael grinned, as if to say, So that’s what skewed your perceptions. “Immaculately conceived, all of you?”
“Nothing divine about my family.” She put the cover on the box containing the brooch and turned her attention to the mundane but more useful pottery. Rim of a storage jar. She marked it down. Base of a cruet.
It was Mark’s turn to stroll through the room. “Y’all fixing to head up to the pub, or would you like some help with that pottery?”
“We’ll be takin’ the brooch to the hotel, anyway,” Michael replied. “Might as well have another ceilidh.”
“A what?”
“A party wi’ music and drinking, like last week.”
“Oh, I’ve been going to those for years. Didn’t know they had a name.” Mark picked up and laid down several of the shards. “The police never found those things that were stolen, did they?”
“Not yet,” answered Rebecca. “More’s the pity.”
“Get on wi’ you,” Michael told him. “We’ll catch you up.”
“Okay.” Mark picked his guitar case out of the corner. Dennis turned off the television. The front door slammed.
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