Night of the Highland Dragon

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Night of the Highland Dragon Page 20

by Isabel Cooper


  “So do I,” said Judith. “Colin would be helpful about now. Never tell him I said that,” she added with a faint smile. “So—a necromancer. Wonderful news.”

  “You already knew he summoned demons.”

  “Aye, well, I’m not saying I’m shocked.” Judith stepped back and looked at the graves, hands on hips and lips pressed tightly together. “When I get my hands on the bastard—but then, we’ll need to know which bastard it is.”

  “A new one,” said William, looking down at the muddy ground.

  “What, we’ve got two?”

  “No. Someone new in town—or at least someone who does more indoor work than most.” He gestured. “See, there are footprints here. All around the graves, I’d wager, though you and I and the girls might have disturbed some of them. Man-sized, though not a man with very large feet or a vast stride. More importantly, they’re from shoes, not boots.”

  “Evans wears shoes,” said Judith. “But if he’d been digging up graves last night, he’d be in one now.”

  “And I don’t get the impression, from what either Claire or Dr. McKendry said, that he came this close to the graves themselves. We can check, but—no, he’s not a likely suspect. That leaves McKendry, though he’s hardly young himself, his friend Hamilton, and me.” William smiled. “And I’m touched that you didn’t think of me immediately when Claire came in.”

  “I saw your face,” said Judith with a shrug. “’Twould be a hell of an actor who could look so surprised—and so displeased. And if you’d done this, you’d not have been nearly so messy about it or have pointed out the footprints. Besides”—she gestured to Ryan—“it rained on him, and rained hard. When it was raining last night, I was with you.”

  “And here I was thinking that you trusted me blindly.”

  Judith turned to him, her smile friendly and predatory at once. “Never blindly. Not anyone. Not even myself. But aye, I trust you.”

  It was the wrong time and place to reach for her. It would have either been irreverent or patronizing. William kept his hands at his sides and simply looked, meeting her eyes for a long minute, before turning reluctantly back to business.

  “Whoever it was,” he said, “he must have had to leave in a hurry. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left things in such a state. There might have been a witness—or the nearest thing to one.”

  “Not Evans, or he wouldn’t have been so shocked. At that, if anyone had seen, word would have gotten around long before Claire and Mairi stumbled in here.”

  “Unless they didn’t see. Our grave robber might have been easy to scare off. If you’ll keep watch,” William said, thanking his better angels that he’d thought he might be going out again and had therefore brought his bag, “I can try to find out more.”

  Judith nodded. “Shout when you’re done,” she said and turned toward the gates of the graveyard. “There’s nobody who’ll see you from outside, and nobody who’ll get past my watch.”

  She headed away from him, her feet making soft noises on the damp earth. William watched as her figure grew smaller. Then he put down his bag, bent, and retrieved the silver chains. He focused his mind as he’d been taught, and before long was barely even aware of Judith’s presence.

  Barely. There was a feeling of safety that he hadn’t experienced before. Maybe it was just because he had a lookout this time, or the sanction of a woman who was as close to the authorities as anyone in Loch Arach was going to be.

  William doubted it.

  Thirty

  The autumn wind did an amazingly good job of cutting through two layers of wool and three of cotton. Judith wrapped her arms around her chest and shifted her weight, hoping that William’s bit of magic wouldn’t take very long—and that it would be useful. In front of her, the road stayed empty; nearby, the stone frames of the church and the parsonage were small and gray against the mountains’ darkness. The smell of wet earth was strong, though not as strong as it had been by the graves themselves, and now she couldn’t even smell a trace of flesh. It had been faint to begin with. The bodies had been old.

  So far she’d not had to turn anyone away from the graveyard. Word would naturally have gotten around by now, but respect would keep most people away, particularly with news of the vicar’s sudden illness.

  Poor Evans. She should have sent for an assistant—and eventual replacement—long before, Judith thought. When she’d first come back, that duty wouldn’t have slipped her mind, but until Claire had mentioned his collapse, she hadn’t thought of his real age. She still remembered him taking up the post: an endearingly homely man, a little past sixty, with curly blondish-gray hair, a full beard, and a plump middle-aged wife. He’d come back around the same time she had. Judith didn’t remember him as a boy—her visits then had been brief—but she knew he’d been born in Loch Arach, kin to one of the Welshmen who’d been her mother’s people, and then left to attend a university.

  That was how it worked now. When she’d been a girl, most people had died without going more than twenty miles from the place they were born. Strictly going by the numbers, she supposed that most of them still did—but it didn’t feel that way. Prosperous men sent their sons away to school. Some even sent their daughters these days. Youths with less money took matters into their own hands. They did as she’d done, despite her wealth, and joined the Queen’s service, or simply ran away and found a trade out in the wider world. The railroads made it easier. The papers made it alluring.

  A few came back for good. She had. Evans had. More stayed gone, and if they returned at all, it was only on a fleeting visit. Take Ross MacDougal—a name and a source of infrequent letters for ten years, and then back with his family, as much a stranger as kin now. He’d be leaving soon, no doubt. Winter in the mountains was no easy stretch, and he’d never acted like a man who’d come to stay. Running from a disappointment wouldn’t make a man linger past snowfall, and neither would the desire to show off his fancy new clothes.

  She caught her breath, the air cold in her throat.

  Fancy new clothes, she mused, and thought of London and of dates. A shape began to emerge out of them: not yet anything clear, but a patch that might be fog or might be a coastline. Judith stood and thought some more. When she heard footsteps coming up behind her, she whirled, expecting William, eager to speak and to listen.

  She made herself wait. Theories should always wait on facts. “Anything?”

  “Not much.” William sighed. “Though it’s as we were thinking. A light went on in the window over at the vicarage, and our man grabbed tools and ran. And it was a man, or at least man-shaped. That’s all. Without recent death, there isn’t as much of an echo to pick up. That isn’t to say I’m longing for murder, of course.”

  “No,” said Judith, not paying much attention. He hadn’t found any new information; therefore, it was time to put together what they did have. “I’d forgotten about someone,” she said. “When we were talking earlier.”

  “Oh?”

  She nodded. “Ross MacDougal. He’s a local lad by birth, but he went down to London about ten years back. Did well for himself, by the way he dresses, and—” She stopped, because William was staring at her, mouth slightly open. “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Respectable-looking chap? About so high”—he sketched with a hand—“with light hair?” When Judith nodded, he said, “We met. Twice. The first time was in the store, before it burnt down. Nothing more than small talk there, but I thought he looked distracted. And I thought that I’d seen him before. Back in England.”

  “Would that mean anything, if you did?”

  “It might. Not that I’ve any single nemesis plotting my downfall,” he added with a quick smile that immediately subsided back into his look of serious thought, “but the men we…handle…run in packs. Cults, mostly. Secret brotherhoods. I wonder sometimes—but that’s not relevant. He and I might have encountered each
other before under less pleasant circumstances.”

  “Or at a gentleman’s club,” said Judith, playing the contrarian now.

  “Or that. Or shared a compartment on a train. So—nothing to hang a man on. Not yet. But the second time—” He paused, and she saw his shoulders stiffen beneath his coat. He took her hands between both of his and looked soberly into her eyes. “The second time he was going to see you.”

  “Was he?” she asked, not alarmed but beginning to be wary. The shape in the distance was beginning to look more like land—and a rocky coastline at that. “When?”

  “The night I…walked in on you. In the forest. I met him on my way back. His mother had asked him to bring a basket up to the castle, he said, and he said too that he’d gotten delayed. He never saw you, I take it.”

  “No, but he wouldn’t have. He knows the cook well. He’d have left it with her, if I wasn’t there, and I’d imagine it might have slipped her mind. I could believe his mother sending things up to the kitchen. She used to be my housekeeper. Poor Elspeth,” said Judith. “If we’re right—damn. She’s that proud of her boy these days.”

  “‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,’” William quoted, but he was mocking neither her nor the situation, she was sure of it. The only humor in his voice was very dark indeed. “He didn’t seem at all glad to see me. But he could have just been out of sorts. It wasn’t a very pleasant walk, I’d think, particularly for a man used to hansom cabs and the Underground.”

  “You would know,” said Judith absently, still thinking of Elspeth—and Gillian too. It’d be a hard blow for the whole family, were Ross the guilty party. No harder than Hamilton’s guilt would be for McKendry, maybe. She scowled down at the rock wall of the graveyard.

  “Not as much as you might think. Most of my work hasn’t been in cities. But”—William squeezed Judith’s hands lightly, drawing her out of her thoughts—“we have no proof of anything yet. Nothing odd happened to you after his visit, did it?”

  Judith shook her head, then laughed, short and sharp. “Nothing I didn’t bring on myself,” she said, looking up at William until a twist of his lips showed that he’d taken her meaning. “So—it’s down to those two. Hamilton’s a medical man. And one who experiments. He’d mentioned blood, for which the dead couldn’t be much good, but his research could have led him in other directions. He wouldn’t be the first surgeon in want of a corpse or two.”

  “What good would demons do him?”

  “What good would they do Ross? Or anyone?” She rubbed her forehead, trying to think. “They were following me. Spying on me. Both men would have heard stories enough about us—Ross when he was young, and Hamilton once he came here. I suppose Hamilton could have been curious. Scientific-minded and all. Ross isn’t.”

  “Wasn’t,” said William. “Ten years can change a man.”

  “Aye. And he could have other reasons. Blackmail, mayhap. Or sorcery. We have”—she hesitated and then settled on a vague enough response—“a few enchantments running, and we are what we are. If he’s learned magic, he could want more power of that kind. There’s no way of knowing.”

  Either of her brothers would have done better, she thought. Colin knew magic and all the games of society, and Stephen lived in London, dealing daily in power and intrigue. She’d been a soldier and a sailor. She was a landlord—landlady—now. The water was up to her neck, and she could barely find the bottom with her toes.

  But this was her village and her duty.

  “The thing to do, I suppose,” she said, “is to see where Hamilton and Ross were last night. Though if we start asking after either of them, whichever one it really is will get wise quickly.”

  “Right,” said William. “And we don’t have much time regardless.” He looked back over his shoulder toward the opened graves. “I don’t know precisely what our man’s planning—spells themselves aren’t my forte—but I do know that anything involving a criminal’s body is likely to be very drastic and very bad.”

  “Worse than demons?”

  “Could be,” said William. “We’ll split up, if you’re amenable. Each ask about one suspect. That way, we stand a chance of finding out what we need before word gets back to the culprit himself.”

  When he’d asked her to keep watch, Judith hadn’t thought anything of the request, too concerned with the desecration and the magic being worked behind her to think of emotional matters. Now, while she considered logistics, a small thought slipped in behind the more practical workings of her mind: He trusts me.

  She had no leisure to be glad, or to worry that she was. “I’ll talk to the MacDougals,” Judith said. “They know me. You take McKendry. We’ll meet at the church at noon, aye?”

  “Aye,” said William, and then he smiled. “That is, yes.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Judith. Figures were coming down the road now: the requested brawny lads with shovels. “It takes a few years more to go native.”

  She headed off, first to meet the approaching crew and then to have what she didn’t doubt would be a series of increasingly unpleasant conversations. Behind her, though, she knew that William smiled, and matters seemed a shade less bleak.

  Thirty-one

  As in any other village William had stayed in or passed through, the well-to-do citizens of Loch Arach clustered near each other, particularly when the source of their income was something other than farming and thus required neither fields nor barns. Dr. McKendry’s low stone house was, therefore, only a short walk from the parsonage and the graveyard. Had Judith not assigned their tasks and given good reason for her decisions, William would have felt that chivalry bound him to protest giving her the longer journey.

  He didn’t think it would have done much good, but he would have had to speak.

  He pushed open the gate and walked through the small garden, now bare and brown except for the solid green darkness of the hedges. Smoke rose steadily from the chimney above him. The smell was comfortingly normal in the face of his morning’s activities and of what still lay ahead.

  The maid who opened the door for him was named Edith, he knew now, and she smiled in recognition when she saw William. “Come along inside,” she said. “He’ll be wanting to see you. They both will—but ’tis quite a morning the doctor’s had.”

  “So I saw,” said William.

  “They’re saying someone’s been robbing graves.” Edith looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes large and round, and William noticed that she was only a few years older than Claire. “Is it true?”

  “Not completely. But—yes, someone’s dug up a few.” She’d find out soon enough. “Only criminals so far. And only the older graves.”

  That was another facet of the mystery, wasn’t it? Did the hand have to be old—yet not so old as to be skeletal—or had Loch Arach simply not hung a man in a while? He paged through books in his memory, all the grimoires he had gotten notes from: Solomon and Abramelin, Agrippa and Parkin. They offered information, but too much of it. He would have given his own hand for a quick way to contact the central office and the men there, scholars rather than field agents, who knew substantially more than the quick summaries and scattered methods he’d learned.

  Seated in a small, blue-papered parlor and waiting for “the gentlemen,” William kept thinking while—he hoped—his face remained outwardly serene and pleasant. Only fifty years ago, people had thought dead men’s hands would cure illness or take away growths. Hamilton was a surgeon. That might not explain the livestock or the demons, but men of science did experiment on animals, and maybe Hamilton had called the creatures up to see if the spells truly worked. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  Or maybe—

  “Mr. Arundell,” said Dr. McKendry, coming in with a tired smile. “Michael will be down directly. He’s finishing up an experiment just now, and these things are tricky business. One misstep and a we
ek’s work is ruined, or so I hear.”

  “I wouldn’t want to disturb that,” William said, wishing that politeness would let him say otherwise, or that he knew enough to be definitely rude. “I wanted to pass along Lady MacAlasdair’s thanks for sending those young chaps up earlier, and to see if you’d had any word about Mr. Evans. I’d like to stop in and extend my sympathies.”

  “Happy to do what I can, of course. Shocking business.” McKendry settled himself into a leather-covered chair and opened a cigar case, offering one first to William, who declined with a shake of his head. “As for Evans, only what I told you before. He’s not likely to be up to company until tomorrow at least. Did you find anything over at the cemetery?”

  “Mostly the obvious,” said William, reserving the hand and the footprints for later necessity. “The grave robber worked in the rain—an enterprising scoundrel, we have to give him that—which means he was at it around nine last night, or half past. I don’t suppose either of you saw anything? You’re tolerably nearby.”

  Dr. McKendry shook his head. “I wish I could help you, lad,” he said, “but I was dead to the world by then. The curse of age, as you’ll know in time. A troop could have marched past my window without me knowing.”

  * * *

  “My lady.” Gillian Gordon turned wide, surprised eyes on Judith, and Judith herself felt slightly off balance. She had expected a formal meeting, not a chance encounter outside the barn. Nonetheless, here Gillian was, a pail of milk in each hand. “Were you coming to the house?”

  “Aye,” said Judith. “Not disturbing anyone, I hope.”

  Gillian shook her head.

  Beneath the remnants of a harvesttime tan, her face was red, especially around the eyes and the nose. Wind or weeping? Judith couldn’t tell.

 

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