Dust to Dust

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Here’s your ID,” said Jerry. “It must’ve been wedged between a couple of the bricks.” Nestled in a piece of cheesecloth was a long, thin strip of lead inscribed with the angular letters of the sixteenth century. “Anne Douglas, mater prioresse, rest in pace.”

  Walled up alive, Rebecca thought. So that was the verdict. Maybe the soldiers had waited outside, at first joking and cat-calling and then in dreadful silence, waited for her to relent and tell them what they wanted to know. But she hadn’t told them. Her child wasn’t all that she’d taken with her to the grave.

  It might have been years before one of the former nuns, after suffering heaven only knew what privation, crept back to the ruined priory and into the darkness of the crypt to leave the only epitaph Anne would ever have. Until now. Jerry folded the cheesecloth around the lead and put it in a box.

  Hilary stood with her arms laced over her blouse. “I didn’t think it would be so cold in here,” she whispered.

  “I’d have expected the lights to take some of the chill off… .” Rebecca’s voice was swallowed by a flat, empty silence that muffled even the repeated whirr-click of Tony’s cameras. She peeled off her jacket and her sweater-vest. “Wear this. I can’t have my assistant catching a cold.”

  “But Michael gave you that.”

  “My mum would be pleased,” said Michael, gracious if distant.

  “Thanks. I’ll get my jacket at noon.” Hilary slipped on the vest.

  “That’ll do for now,” said Tony, his voice, like his features, obscured by the camera.

  “All right,” Jerry said. “Dr. Campbell, if you please.”

  Michael stepped into the tomb. He affixed one more light bulb to the ceiling and pegged its cord into a crevice between stones. “They had to have left her a lamp,” he said, half to himself, “or she’d no have written… . There.” He pointed to a saucer-shaped bit of pottery. “A wee bit of oil, a wick—she might’ve had several hours of light.”

  Adele started humming something under her breath, half smiling. Jerry said loudly, “Okay, there’s a limit to how many people can get in there without stepping on something. A shame that brick broke her femur.”

  “You pushed me into the wall,” muttered Dennis.

  Jerry’s moustache quivered like a mongoose spotting a snake. “You scared the hell out of me, jumping out of the dark like that. What did you expect me to do, say hi, come on in, have a cuppa?”

  Dennis subsided. Rebecca didn’t doubt Jerry had indeed taken advantage of Elaine’s arrest to check the place out for himself. But surely not even Jerry would deliberately break down a wall.

  Elaine. Non-essential personnel. Perfect timing on Mackenzie’s part, to take her instead of… . Well, assuming Hilary and Rebecca herself were exempt, the Chief Inspector was going to either have to take Adele next, start over again on the men, or expand his cast of characters.

  Jerry bowed Rebecca and Hilary into the room. Michael extended his good hand to help them over the rubble. Tony took more pictures.

  Claustrophobia wasn’t the word for what Rebecca felt as she crouched in the dust, making herself as small as possible, not only not to disturb the skeleton, but also to keep the walls from closing in. She wrote methodically in her notebook, trying not to hurry. Hilary used onionskin paper to trace the more complex designs. More than once Rebecca called Tony and his cameras to zero in on a particular drawing or inscription. The crowned and winged heart of the Douglases. The diagonal bar of the Elliots. A rampant lion, the arms of Scotland—a reference to Robert the Bruce? Henry the VIII’s greyhound.

  “What did she write all this with?” asked Hilary. She pulled the sweater tighter around her.

  “A piece of charcoal, I’d say. Grabbed out of a fireplace as they marched her away, possibly, so she could leave a testament?”

  “An English soldier gave Joan of Arc a cross made out of twigs. In Shaw’s play, he gets out of hell one day every year for that good deed.”

  “I don’t think anyone did Anne any good deeds.”

  The smudged letters were blotches of shadow crawling across the wall, a mingling of Scots, English, French, German, Latin. “Many religious women were the intellectuals of their day,” said Adele admiringly.

  Some words were dark and firm, some faint, mere scratches on the wall. The drawings were clumsy but urgent. More than once Rebecca had to close her eyes, soothing the squirm of her shoulder blades and a creeping light-headedness. She kept wanting to look around at the empty eyes of the skull. The air wasn’t good in here. If any place in the priory was haunted, this was it… .

  Odd, how Anne’s ghost had always been reputed to be a vengeful one, cursing lovers. And yet here, in Anne’s very presence, Rebecca felt only sorrow. Not helplessness, not hopelessness, but sorrow mitigated by faith.

  She copied a crucifix. Beside it were four representations of a wheel cross and several lines from the ancient and semi-pagan poem “The Dream of the Rood”. Between each two crosses was a similar pattern of straight and wavy lines, not unlike the pattern in Michael’s and her own sweaters. She checked Hilary’s notebook. Yes, a perfect copy. She murmured a compliment.

  Rebecca’s pencil was smearing as badly as the charcoal. “Mark, may I borrow your knife, please?” Silently he handed it over. She sharpened her pencil, tidied away the shavings, folded the knife, and dropped it in her pocket.

  The chamber was bone-chillingly cold. Each one of the press of bodies seemed to be hoarding its warmth. Everyone’s voices, even Jerry’s bellow, grew softer until they were all whispering. The noises of brick against brick, and the steady sweep of a broom, came from farther and farther away. At some point the flashbulbs stopped making little novas in the corners of Rebecca’s eyes, but the charcoal letters still wriggled. “Dieu et mon droit. Henry’s VIII’s motto—’God and my right’,” she read aloud.

  “In other words,” Jerry said with a trace of envy, “I can do anything I want because God is on my side.”

  “Touchin’ humility,” said Michael. He started tenderly spooning dust away from Anne’s feet.

  “Fortite et recte,” Rebecca went on. “The motto of the Elliots.”

  “Thomas may have come to a bad end in London,” said Hilary, “but he sure had something to do with Anne here.”

  “Just friends,” Mark said with forced levity.

  There was a long passage. Rebecca considered it. Enlightenment dawned—of course, the King James Bible came after Anne’s time. This was in the earlier dialect. But it was the same verse from Matthew Rebecca herself had thought of the day she arrived in Scotland. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow,” she said softly, “for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

  “What is she trying to tell us?” asked Adele.

  “She was just keeping herself busy,” Jerry answered. “No ghostly memoranda. Sorry.”

  Rebecca scooted closer to Hilary. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I think she knew someone would eventually find her. A resurrection of sorts— we’ve all heard the voices singing that Easter verse. All this might be to justify herself. Or she could be trying to leave a message.”

  “Thank you,” said Adele, so fervently everyone looked around.

  Mark told her, “It’s just that we don’t want to believe all of that supernatural stuff, you know, not that it’s not true.”

  Jerry glared indignantly at them both. Tony, reloading his video camera in a dark corner, smiled with a flash of white teeth. Michael went on spooning dust, concealing an amused expression.

  “Well!” said Hilary, eyeing yet another inscription. “My German is of the ‘may I have mustard on that’ variety, but does this say what I think it does?”

  Rebecca dredged her linguistic gray matter. Again she recognized the passage. “My body is in torment, my soul in delight. As he draws her to himself, she gives herself to him. She cannot hold back.”

  “Wow,” said Jerry. “Old Anne was ho
t to trot.”

  “God, Jerry!” Rebecca protested.

  “Get oot of it,” Michael told him. “That was written by a Bavarian nun aboot ‘a greeting the body may not know’. The union of the soul with God, either in religious ecstasy or after death, I suppose.”

  “She didn’t get that baby from religious ecstasy,” retorted Jerry.

  “Look at this.” Rebecca’s pencil drew yet another crowned heart. Below it were the words, “Alexander, I confess that I have failit, quhilk God have forgeuin. God have mercy on our childe… .”

  The silence was absolute. Somewhere a brick or a stone shifted with a tiny creak. Something rustled in the darkness beyond the lights. Hilary’s whisper, “Is it lunch time yet?” sounded like a shout.

  “Yeah,” said Jerry. “Let’s get out of here.”

  In one multi-legged knot they trudged down the passageway and up the stairs and broke free into the clear, clean Scottish air. After the colorless crypt, the blues and greens of Rudesburn were so brilliant they burned the retina. Rebecca couldn’t recall a time when she’d been so grateful to see and feel sunshine. She inhaled deeply, trying to chase away the grains of dust and decay still lingering in her lungs. But not even sunshine and air could clear the images of those charcoaled letters.

  Tony and Jerry walked off, trading barbed remarks about Anne, Elaine, and women in general, the quest for publicity making strange bedfellows. Adele, deep in thought, wafted toward the cottage. Dennis followed, shaking his head. Hilary disappeared into the cloister; after a moment’s hesitation, Mark followed.

  “So it was Alexander and Anne, not Thomas,” said Michael.

  “Did Thomas kill Alexander?” Rebecca returned, rotating her injured shoulder. “It must’ve been right at the time of the trial—Alexander’s name is on the warrant. Half-heartedly, I’ll admit.”

  “Neither bloke testified against her?”

  “I don’t think so. I need to get back to the records.” Rebecca snorted. “What I need is a thirty-hour day.”

  Grant looked into the west door. “Michael? Rebecca? Chief Inspector Mackenzie wants you in the pub.”

  “No,” Michael said with a sigh, “thirty hours is no enough.”

  After the silence of the crypt, the voices in the pub were like a barrage of artillery fire. Devlin and Mackenzie were ensconced at the table by the fireplace. Every other table was filled, and reporters were ranged elbow-to-elbow along the bar. Jerry held court in their midst, dropping hints about startling revelations at the press conference this evening. The cats ambled among the tables scouting for dropped bits of food.

  No sooner had Michael and Rebecca ordered ale and ploughman’s lunches from a harried Bridget than Tony and Elaine slipped into the last empty booth. Elaine was so pale her red petulant lips made her look like a vampire who had just fed. Tony leaned his elbows on the table and jerked his head toward the four people sitting beside the fireplace. Elaine refused to look. Bridget took their order and headed into the kitchen.

  “No luck, I take it?” Michael asked Devlin.

  Today Devlin looked less like a leprechaun than a gargoyle. He deferred to Mackenzie. If Mackenzie was perturbed by having proved nothing against Elaine, he didn’t betray it. His beaked face was that of an eagle perched on a high branch, watching for the subtle movement in the grass that would betray a mouse. “Yes,” he said coolly, “Miss Vavra had been afraid Miss Fitzgerald would find out about her past. But Miss Fitzgerald never mentioned it.”

  “I don’t suppose the photographer who took that picture of her was Tony?” Rebecca asked.

  “No, it wasn’t, more’s the pity.”

  From somewhere in the melee a cat squawked and hissed and bodies eddied. Michael, facing toward the disturbance, muttered something about people with big feet. The animals made their escape into the kitchen when Bridget emerged with four plates of cheese, bread, and salad. Rebecca asked herself what she was doing as a delicately frothing glass of ale appeared before her. She never drank at lunch. She swallowed the hearty liquid and was grateful to be alive.

  “So you found the prioress,” said Mackenzie, carefully dissecting his pickled onion.

  “Jerry wants to hold a press conference,” Devlin added.

  Michael downed half his ale. He took off his sling to free both hands to manipulate knife and fork. “It’ll make waves from Land’s End to John O’ Groats,” he said in a wicked imitation of Jerry’s American accent. “It’ll be in the papers back home. Old Harry murdering a pregnant nun. Book deals, movie rights—we’ve got it made.”

  Devlin laughed. “Surely you’re embroiderin’ just a bit.”

  “Just a bit,” Michael conceded. “But when I rang Graham last night, he said to script Jerry’s announcement and make sure he stayed wi’ it.”

  “And make sure he stays with archeology, not true crime fantasies.” Mackenzie leaned forward. “Dr. Campbell, Dr. Reid, did King Henry really murder a pregnant nun?”

  “Judicial murder,” said Michael.

  “The physical evidence supports the documents,” Rebecca said, showing the detectives her notebook. “And so much evidence, too—Jerry’s not exaggerating when he says this is a remarkable site. Anne was indubitably pregnant, by Alexander Douglas, her cousin. Why and how, I don’t know.”

  Michael’s eyes glinted over the rim of his glass. “Well, you see, lass, there’re birds and there’re bees… .”

  “Michael!”

  Devlin blandly scooped salad onto his fork. Mackenzie said, “Go on, Dr. Reid.”

  “The English threw every charge they could think of against her, apparently to try and get her to give up the plate and the relics. Her being pregnant just added fuel to the fire. Or bricks to the wall. The morals charges would lend weight to those of witchcraft—she wasn’t being a good little nun.” Rebecca drank again. Her stomach felt like a trash compactor, squeezing her lunch into a tighter and tighter ball. “According to the superstition of the time, pregnancy resulted only if both parties—er—reached climax. So a woman couldn’t claim rape if a pregnancy resulted.”

  “You think Anne was raped?” asked Devlin.

  “All I know is that she says she forgives Alexander. Maybe it was more of a masculine power play. Coercion rather than brute force. The results are the same. The man gets his jollies, the woman pays for it.”

  “Alexander died for something,” Michael murmured.

  “Politics,” said Rebecca.

  Mackenzie said, “Dr. Reid, you must meet my wife. You have a great deal in common.”

  “I’d no be so sure that’s a compliment,” added Michael dryly.

  Devlin, who presumably knew Amanda Fraser, choked into his glass. Rebecca shot an appraising glance at Michael, but his face was expressionless.

  Mackenzie built himself a miniature sandwich of bread slice, cheese slice, and onion ring. Jerry made the expansive gestures of an orchestra conductor, all the listening faces nodding on cue. Tony walked by on his way to get refills of beer. Elaine plastered her fork with mounds of shepherd’s pie. The Galashiels jail, it appeared, had yet to hire a cordon bleu chef.

  “Or it could really have been a love match,” Rebecca continued, deciding not to give Michael a behave-yourself pinch beneath the table. “Anne forgave Alexander for sinning against the church rather than her personally.”

  “She didna ask forgiveness for herself,” Michael said. “No ‘mea culpa’.”

  Bridget asked if they wanted anything else. Rebecca ordered a cup of tea to try and counteract the ale. The objects on the mantelpiece blurred before her heavy-lidded eyes, the model trolley pulling up before the ceramic fisherman’s cottage, the horn snuff box whispering from the side of its lid to Paddington Bear, salmon rising through the iridescent depths of the glass paperweights so that the fishing lures leaned forward in expectation.

  “So,” said Michael, inserting his arm back into the sling, “are you thinkin’ the whereabouts to the treasure is concealed in the documentation?”<
br />
  “Very clever, Dr. Campbell.” Mackenzie drained his glass and looked at the foam still lacing its rim like a gypsy would consider a smear of tea leaves. “But it’s not so much a matter of whether I believe it, but that the killer does. He or she is no fool—if he scarpered now, we’d be after him. And he wouldn’t have the treasure.”

  Rebecca visualized a faceless form prowling around her bedroom the night she’d first gotten the trial records. She remembered the lights in the hotel attic, and the knife striking Michael. She poured milk into her cup. The rim of the pitcher chattered against the china, and she stiffened her wrist. “Why can’t Americans make good hot tea?” she asked parenthetically.

  “You’re fixated on puttin’ ice in it,” Michael replied, and went on, his words clipped, “My friend Colin thought we probably knew something we didn’t know we knew. Our historical knowledge must be it. I take it we’re no longer under suspicion, that you’re askin’ for our help?”

  “You may take that,” answered Mackenzie, without so much as a blink. “The more certain I am that the historical mystery is tied in with the real one, the more certain I am I need your expertise.”

  Rats, Rebecca thought. When she tried to get Mackenzie to admit he needed their help, he wouldn’t. Had he gotten that much more worried? She didn’t chide him for calling the historical mystery unreal.

  “Time’s running out on the dig and on the treasure hunt as well,” the Chief Inspector went on. “I’m bringing in more constables. Some of the groundskeepers will be my lads. Also some of the tourists.”

  “Mind you have a care,” added Devlin. “You have what the killer wants, the location of the treasure. He’ll be after you.”

  With that, the two detectives rose and threaded their way out of the bar. “But we don’t know where it is,” Rebecca protested to their backs.

  Michael groaned. “How do we get oursel’s into these things, lass?”

  “Providence? Astrology? Karma?”

  They huddled with Laurence and Nora in the hall and explained the situation. The Bairds exchanged a worried look. “You should leave,” Laurence said. “We’ll stop the dig and send everyone home.”