Rebecca shot him a sardonic glance.
“Adele’s in shock ower her son’s death,” he went on. “And I assume Mark’s learned by noo where babies come from. What I wonder is why Mackenzie asked you to name the killer? Givin’ you permission to play detective?”
“I doubt it. Just testing intuition against logic, I guess.”
Michael growled something in his throat, a noise of assent, Rebecca supposed, although it could have been miffed skepticism. What did he want, for Mackenzie to ask his opinion, too? The Chief Inspector would be getting around to it, Rebecca was sure of that.
Grant was in the cemetery shoveling dirt back into the cavity whence had come the eclectic assortment of clues, fish and chips wrappers, ancient warrant, and fingernail. “Just settin’ it to rights,” he told them. “Whoever’s sleepin’ there, it’s no their fault, is it?”
“Hardly,” Michael told him.
They walked on around the church, behind the east window, and came to the chapter house. It was on this soft blanket of greensward Sheila had died. The grass was resilient; nothing marked the spot except a wilted bouquet of daisies. The Johnstons had probably placed it there, punctilious to a fault.
The sun had sunk far enough to the west that the wall of the chapter house shaded the grass and the derelict flowers. Rebecca leaned into Michael’s grasp, remembering the nightmare she had had her first morning in Scotland, of darkness through which moved nameless predators. And yet beyond the shadow, the sunlight glinted green and gold on the nearer hills, making the hills on the horizon ethereal blue. To the south the Law was the weatherbeaten face of a crotchety but well-meaning old man. The dark spoil heap of excavated soil was piled against the perimeter wall, the sieve leaning beside it.
A cold draft spilled through the tracery of the east window, carrying first a distinct odor of onions, ale, and sweat, then the sound of voices. Rebecca broke out in gooseflesh. Michael’s arm went rigid.
“Salve Regine,” sang the high, clear voices. “Salve Regine, mater misericordie. Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris.” The words faded, then returned. “Christus resurgens ex mortuis iam moritur mors illi non dominabit.”
“Maybe Christ rose from the dead,” said Michael under his breath, “but Sheila’ll no be comin’ back.”
Wishful thinking, Rebecca reflected, and then bit her lip. The flowers stirred uneasily in the wind. Again the music ebbed, along with the odor not of sanctity but of life. Together she and Michael stepped cautiously along the slype until they could see into the church. Through the transept door oozed the radiant cold of an iceberg. Something moved through the chill, glimmering gauzy pale in the blocks of sunlight, in the stripes of shadow a solid white.
Rebecca felt her face go steam-hot, and her eyes open so far that flecks of dust settled on her contacts. She could hear only the wind, and the trees rustling, and the prosaic scrape of Grant’s shovel from the cemetery. The shape glided through the choir of the church and disappeared into the nave. The cold drained away down a cool evening breeze.
There was a sudden movement. Rebecca jumped. Michael’s hand convulsed on hers. Adele was standing beside them. “It’s Anne Douglas,” she stated. “She’s still here, waiting for redemption. Her task isn’t done.”
“What does she want?” asked Michael hoarsely.
Adele shook her head. “I’m not sure. She died a martyr; maybe she wants revenge on her murderers. Maybe she’s guarding something important—maybe that’s the reason they killed her.”
“We don’t know they killed her,” Rebecca said. The heat was draining from her cheeks, leaving her dizzy.
Adele regarded Rebecca and Michael as calmly as a Sunday school teacher setting out the day’s lesson for heathen pupils. “I do. She told me. She died for love, you see. But that love has yet to be redeemed.” On that non sequitur Adele walked through the door and into the church, where she knelt before the slab of rock that had once supported the altar and began to pray. The sun glancing through the west door made her gray hair shine.
“I’d advise retreat,” said Michael, “dignified or otherwise.”
He and Rebecca trotted past the excavation, across the bridge, and to the cottage. Once on the step they exchanged a long, speculative look. “And how much of that is true?” Rebecca asked.” I can believe the English killed Anne, although you’d think if it was anything really spectacular, like Joan of Arc, it would have been recorded.”
“A martyr dyin’ for love. I take it Adele dinna mean profane and uninspirin’ love for a man. For her faith? For her country?”
Rebecca shook her head. “Notice, Michael, how neither one of us doubts that she really has been talking to Anne.”
Michael swore softly. He and Rebecca exchanged dazed smiles, turned, and went into the cottage.
Chapter Sixteen
It wasn’t fair. Her brain was numb, but not her nerves. It would be much more helpful if it were the other way around.
Michael sat at the dining room table, using a needle to probe the artifact ring. Right now it was the least glamorous piece of jewelry Rebecca had ever seen, encrusted thickly with God only knew what. “Gold?” she asked.
“That it is,” he replied. “Nice and heavy. Get the water, please.”
In the kitchen Adele was dismembering the remains of dinner’s roasted chicken, looking like a greeting card version of a grandmother. “Nora gave me a recipe for cockie-leekie soup,” she said. “I’ll try that tomorrow.”
“Whatever you want,” Rebecca said cautiously.
Hilary was washing dishes. At Rebecca’s step she looked around. Her smile was pleasant enough, but it was obvious she’d been hoping for someone else. Rebecca restrained herself from hugging the girl, patting her head, and delivering an unhelpful and much too late “There, there, I understand.” She didn’t understand. She had had her share of trauma, but not, thank God, that one.
She got the container of distilled water from the pantry and a saucer from the cabinet. From the door Mark called, “Would you like me to dry?”
That’s who rated the dewy-eyed smile. Rebecca wanted to tell Mark to leave Hilary alone. And yet, after her first rebuff he was making his new approach as carefully as an airplane on instruments circling a foggy airport. Maybe it would work, after all—it wasn’t only a matter of Hilary trusting him, but of him being trustworthy.
Michael arranged the dental picks and the soft brushes from the conservation kit. Rebecca poured the water into the saucer and wet a cotton swab. Her first tentative swipe at the ring brought off a layer of brownish green grunge that made her stomach uneasy.
Dennis walked by. “Shouldn’t you be using that chemical kit?”
“It’s gold,” Michael replied. “Water’ll turn the trick quite nicely. If it was latten or bronze, we’d be usin’ the kit.”
Rebecca went on, “Remember how all of Tutankhamen’s gold grave goods were in perfect shape? Dry climate, of course. But gold holds up very well.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Dennis turned on the television.
Another layer of dirt parted company with the ring, revealing a flattened side. “I do believe it is a signet,” Rebecca said. “Keep your fingers crossed for a device of some kind.”
“Let me.” Michael took the ring and applied a brush.
Adele put the chicken in the refrigerator and went upstairs. Mark and Hilary went out the back door. Rebecca felt like a mother watching her daughter leave on a first date.
She pressed her fingertips against her sinuses. Dinner and an aspirin had helped her headache. A Mackenzie headache, a new variety of migraine. A Michael headache. Through her lashes she inspected Michael’s solemn, intense face. They’d actually retrieved a bit of affection today. Maybe there was hope yet. He’s trustworthy, she told herself. I trust him.
“Give me a yes or no answer, Michael. Do you want me to stay here?” she said abruptly.
He shot her an upward glance, the typical queasy male, “Aaargh, she wants to talk personal
relations.” With a sigh that was remarkably ungrudging, considering, he replied, “I’d like for you to make a decision you can live wi’. Whether you live wi’ me or no.”
“What decision can you live with?”
Michael wriggled like a butterfly skewered to a collection box, the chloroform descending. “I told you. I want a home. I want a wife. Sometime doon the way, I’ll be wantin’ a family. Proper enough.”
“Standard operating procedure,” Rebecca agreed. “The question is, do you want a wife who not only has a career but the same one you have? Or do you want one who’ll make a career out of being your wife?”
“I want you, Rebecca,” he said. “I want you to want me.”
She, too, was a carrier of headache. Now Michael was rubbing his temples, eyes shut, lips thin. She shouldn’t have put him on the spot like that. Rebecca took the pick and the ring and levered a chip of damp dirt from it. A thin gleam of gold winked at her. “Sorry,” she said.
Michael attempted a smile, but his eyes showed annoyance. With himself, Rebecca estimated, for not giving her what she wanted, and with her for wanting something he couldn’t give.
A chunk of debris fell off the ring. The flat surface gleamed in the overhead light. They exchanged a quick, pleased glance. “All right! A coat of arms!” Rebecca turned the ring back and forth, inspecting the finely incised lines, Michael’s breath warm on her cheek.
“A diagonal bar,” he said. “I’d rather expected the crowned heart of the Douglases.”
“Did you really? He could’ve been working for the Douglases, I guess.” They bumped heads and laughed. “There’s the motto. Fortite et recte. ‘Guts and truth’, more or less.”
“Mean anything to you?” Michael asked.
“Yeah, it jingles a little bell in there somewhere…”
The back door opened. Hilary’s giggle receded up the staircase. Mark’s solid body loomed behind Rebecca’s shoulder. “Thank you for saving the bread for me. It was delicious.”
She glanced up. If he’d been a cat he would have been licking feathers off his whiskers. Got yourself a kiss this time, eh?
“Is that the ring from the skeleton?” Mark asked, dropping into another chair. “Is it gold?”
“Signet ring,” Rebecca replied. “You press it into wax to seal a document. Appropriate enough, considering today’s discovery. We knew the man was wealthy from his clothes, and he must’ve been in a position of some influence to have had a coat of arms.”
Fortite et recte. She saw those words incised in wax. She saw the seals clinging to the bottom of the warrant. A diagonal bar, a simple enough device. She grimaced, eyes screwed shut, trying to see not the warrant itself—her glimpse this afternoon had been too brief—but the photographs of it in Michael’s collection of plans and printouts. One seal, in the corner, was askew on its wax blob.
From far away came Mark’s voice. “Does she do this often?”
“Oh aye,” said Michael. “A directory scan takes a bit of effort.”
Rebecca’s eyes flew open. “It’s the coat of arms of the Elliots!”
Mark stared. “Elliot? Rudesburn’s commendator? Is he in the cellar?”
“This is Elliot country,” Michael cautioned. “And Pringle says Thomas, the commendator, was in London several years after Henry VIII’s death.”
Rebecca laid the ring in its box. “We have no proof that the body is Thomas Elliot’s. It could be another Elliot, or Joe Blow wearing an Elliot ring. All we know is that Thomas had to have been in political favor to have gotten the post as commendator, and that that didn’t matter any more when the English came through.”
Michael snorted aggravation. “We dinna ken if Elliot was acquitted of those charges, or if he simply escaped. Damn Mackenzie, scarperin’ wi’ the records!”
And Jerry, Rebecca thought. And Sheila.
“I can hardly wait to get out there tomorrow,” said Mark. “I like this mystery much better than the real-time one.”
Michael and Rebecca groaned their concurrence and went back to work on the ring, debating possibilities and lamenting the shortage of facts. At last Mark drifted away. Michael said under his breath, “Do you think someone ought to tell him aboot Hilary?”
“She needs to tell him herself.” Rebecca leaned back and stretched. “I do believe everyone’s gone to bed.”
“I’ll tidy up. You go on yoursel’.”
Rebecca kissed the top of his head, collected her things, and went into the bathroom. Serial suspects, she thought, as she washed her face and brushed her teeth. Mackenzie had collared Michael and then Mark; who would he focus on next? Michael, Mark, and Mackenzie. Sounded like a law firm.
She found Michael putting the box with the ring into the drawer of the bedside table. “I’ll no be takin’ chances,” he told her, and disappeared toward the bathroom.
He knew what not to leave to chance. Every morning he handed her her packet of birth control pills. And yet someday he wanted a family. She assumed she’d want children, too—it seemed a normal enough part of existence. She’d much rather bear Michael a child than any other man she’d known. He’d be there for her, unlike her brothers, who had followed their father’s example and decreed the business of labor and delivery rooms “women’s work.” Rebecca had finally shamed Kevin into finishing what he’d begun at the birth of his third child. Her sister-in-law had gazed at her in mute gratitude, her parents had, as usual, been baffled that their swan had turned into an ugly duckling. “But dear,” her mother had murmured, “that just isn’t done.”
She lay down and pulled up the covers. She saw herself like her sisters-in-law, frazzled by two a.m. screams, Sshaped from toting a baby on one hip, smelling of sour milk, the desperation of a trapped animal lurking in her eyes. And she visualized eighteen-year-old Karen Owen, a child herself, staring in despair at a baby who had Mark’s gray eyes. How hard had he pressed her to sleep with him? Had she enjoyed it? Had he bothered to hold her, to help her, while she gave birth to the consequence of their folly?
Michael came into the bedroom, stood for a moment, leaned over and laid an affectionate if cautious kiss on her forehead. “Good night.”
“Good night,” she returned.
Rebecca lay in the darkness listening to the slow rise and fall of his breath repeating the wind through the willows outside. Maybe she heard singing from the priory, maybe not. She was too tired to care. Her thoughts slipped in and out of her consciousness like Anne’s ghost in and out of shadow—murder mysteries and mysteries of love and sex—nothing was solved, nothing was soluble—she heard the old song about the battle of Sheriffmuir in 1715, We ran and they ran and we ran… .
And they ran and we ran, echoed her breathless dreams, until at last dream solidified into image.
She was in an oddly distorted version of the cloister. The sky glared a brassy blue. The walls were tinted gold, their shadows dense as smoke. Out of the corner of her eye she saw quick glints of light, sunlight flashing off camera lenses or the sharp beaks of ravens. She was wearing a Cistercian nun’s white habit, rucked up around her thighs. The material was thin as cheesecloth, and she felt the grass pricking her shoulders and buttocks.
Mark lay on one elbow beside her, wearing nothing but jeans and a towel draped around his neck. His hand moved teasingly between her legs. “Tibia,” he murmured. “Patella. Femur. The soft tissues are all gone now. All that appealing, stimulating, flesh, all gone.”
His hand slipped beneath the material of her habit. She woke with a start, her only too substantial flesh achingly humid. The bedroom and its dawn-silvered light barely registered. Mark. That wasn’t right. Michael.
Michael was sleeping on his side, imitating the fetal position of the bones in the cellar. But his flesh was just as tangible as hers. In one movement Rebecca threw back her covers, lunged across the gap between the beds, dragged his covers away. She fumbled with the waistband of his shorts and abraded her lips on his stubbled cheeks.
With a sha
rp inhalation of surprise he awoke. He exhaled in comprehension and seized her, scooping away her gown. He must have been a Boy Scout, she thought incoherently. He was certainly quickly prepared.
It seemed like seconds later she was rubbing the back of her neck—whiplash—and gazing cross-eyed and trembling at his sweaty, slightly stunned, face. Well, that was one way to relieve stress. “Ah, lass,” he said with a slow smile, “I didna think you cared.”
Thought condensed from the steam misting her brain. She drooped, unable to meet that acute blue gaze. Wham, bam, thank you sir. That wasn’t caring. She’d been dreaming about someone else; what that had been was cheap.
Michael’s hand pulled her face around. “Eh, love?”
Hell of a posture. She extricated herself from him, yanked down her gown, and plunked onto the edge of the bed. The alarm went off. She batted the small travel clock across the table.
Michael’s face crisped into bafflement. “What have I done noo?”
“You exist,” she said. And, realizing that had come out wrong, tried to explain without incriminating herself. “I was just using you. I’m sorry.”
“If that’s the way you want tae use me, go right ahead.”
“God, Michael. That’s cheap.” The heat drained from her body. The room was cold. She was cold. She hugged herself. Give me the right words, she pleaded with her own recalcitrant mind. Just a few right words.
Michael sat up and wrapped his arms around her. “Do you remember the first night we were together? I was sae worried aboot doin’ right by you. And you told me I couldna do wrong by you, because it was me. Do you want me tae tell you the same noo?”
Even if she told him she’d been dreaming of someone else, it wouldn’t bother him. It hadn’t bothered him telling her about his affair with Sheila. What did she want, she demanded of herself, for him to throw a possessive fit? “I don’t know what the hell I want,” she said.
“Oh aye?” Bafflement became irritation. His arms fell away. He stood up, remarkably dignified despite his shorts puddled around one ankle. “Tell me. Were you born daft, or did I make you that way?”
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