Shadows in Scarlet

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Like his namesake, my brother,” Malcolm said cheerfully.

  Norah shot him a warning glance. To Amanda she said, “You’ll be wanting to take the proper documentation back to the States with you. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “Thank you. I hope none of this embarrasses you.”

  “Why should it? I may be my brother’s keeper, but I’m certainly not my ancestor’s. No one ever thought James a saint. Or Archibald, for that matter. I’ll be dining out on this story for months.” Norah stood up. “Here, I came to call you for dinner. You must be hungry, Amanda, especially since you had no lunch.”

  “Did you bring me the sandwich? I’m sorry, I never noticed.”

  “No worry. The cats made a good job of it.”

  Amanda laughed. Malcolm grinned. Cerberus bounded through the gate, forging a path toward the kitchen.

  The household lingered a long time over raspberry trifle and coffee, discussing the scandalous events of the eighteenth century. If Amanda accidentally let slip one or two items she’d learned not from archaeology or historiography but from the supernatural, the Grants and the Finlays took it in stride, probably thinking it was the usual educated make-believe.

  When Amanda walked back through the entrance hall she found a damp wind keening through the front door. The sunny afternoon had turned to an early evening. She glanced outside. Clouds filled the sky and erased the distant mountains. The vibrant green of the grass had faded. It looked like she’d been really lucky to have sunshine her first couple of days in Scotland.

  She flicked the light switch at the bottom of the stairwell. The bulbs on each landing left swathes of shadow on the steps themselves. Up she went, and forced herself to stop and look at James’s portrait. But his gaze, as usual, was self-absorbed. Now Amanda understood why Isabel had been so skeptical about dashing James. Why she’d defaulted to colorless Archibald.

  Dashing might work for a brief affair but for the long haul colorless was the way to… . Well, no, Amanda thought, surely you could split the difference.

  She scanned the other portraits as she passed. One was a forbidding Victorian gentleman, mutton chop whiskers and all, who was a dead ringer for Archibald. A grandson, maybe. Hard to believe a personable person like Malcolm was descended from such a line of humorless heavies. Come on, she told herself. That’s just the way they had their portraits painted is all. In private they probably scratched where it itched just like everyone else.

  The dimness in the great hall clotted into deep shadow in the corners. Amanda caught a reflected gleam either from the display case or from the sword inside, but the wooden crate was just a lump on the floor. A lump of clay, which is what James’s feet were made of. “Damn it all anyway,” she murmured as she turned away, but with more weariness than resentment.

  Amanda groped inside the library door for the light switch. She blinked in the sudden burst of light. “Shit!”

  The pages of Archibald’s memoirs made a trail from the settee to the fireplace. Several were actually inside the grate, wadded like kindling. But, judging by the space heater next to the desk and the polished andirons on the hearth, the fireplace hadn’t been used for years.

  James was trying to hide the evidence. But it was too late, she’d already read the story—no. His disembodied emotions sensed Archibald’s heavy hand and lashed out at it. They sensed Amanda’s agitation and tried to eliminate the cause, just like the time… .

  Oh my God, she thought. Like the time Wayne fell down the staircase, soon after he’d actually laid hands on her. She’d asked him if he’d seen anything. She’d never asked him if he felt anything, a push or a trip.

  Chilled, Amanda gathered up the pages of Archibald’s manuscript and smoothed the crumpled ones. Thank goodness James—James’s uncontrolled temper—hadn’t found a candle to play with this time. Thank goodness he didn’t know he could have turned on the space heater and stuffed the pages inside the bars. They would have burned, then. So would Dundreggan Castle.

  By the time Malcolm strolled into the room she was back on the settee, putting the pages into order. He raised a brow at her startled reaction to his entrance, but said nothing.

  Malcolm printed out his drawings to the music of the Rolling Stones, every now and then playing accompaniment on air guitar. Amanda kept waiting for thunder and lightning, appropriate special effects for a haunted evening, but except for the occasional gust of wind that echoed Mick Jagger’s wail, the evening was silent.

  “Will you sit yoursel’s doon?” Malcolm demanded.

  Amanda looked up. The cats were prowling restlessly around the room, over the desk, and across his drawings. Every now and then one of them would go to the door and peer out. “It’s the wind,” she stated.

  “Oh aye,” Malcolm said, but his eye turned speculatively from the cats to Amanda and back again.

  From downstairs came a burst of excited barking, quickly shushed by Norah’s calm voice. The cats oozed beneath the settee and crouched with their paws tucked tightly beneath their bodies, in the shadows looking like two giant dust-bunnies.

  Malcolm was still marking the prints with a red pencil when Amanda gave it up for the night. Tempting as it was to stay here with him, her nerves felt like they’d been stretched on a rack. If she was going to scream, she’d better do it alone.

  She tucked all the incriminating papers back into the cabinet and shut the door. “Good night, Malcolm.”

  He looked up with a smile. “Good night. From ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night …”

  “I’d rather have the beasties, thanks.” She felt his eyes on her back as she left the room, and was sure she felt other eyes on her back as she walked along the corridors.

  Her door had a lock but no key. Not that a lock would keep him out. Amanda turned on the bathroom light. The floor was littered with pink and yellow blossoms. Every flower in the window alcove had been beheaded. The bare stalks stood up like a handful of arrows. James, don’t make it worse!

  Nothing.

  Amanda gathered up the scattered petals. She took a hot shower and left the bathroom light on and the door ajar. She pulled the comforter to her chin and gazed into the artificial twilight.

  Footsteps walked down the hall, the floor creaking at each stride. It was either Malcolm or Norah. Amanda tried willing herself to sleep. She heard another set of footsteps punctuated by creaks and the sound of a door shutting. Water pipes groaned. The window rattled gently.

  Slowly she began to relax. James’s childish display of spite had worn him out. He’d gone back to sleep. Tomorrow he’d sleep for eternity, a troubled soul finally at rest.

  He’d better rest. She’d done all she could for him.

  Through her doze she heard approaching steps. Just steps, no creaks. Instantly she was wide awake, staring through the shadows toward her door. The doorknob turned. But the door never opened. An icy draft billowed through the room. A furtive gleam of scarlet winked in the shadows.

  Amanda shut her eyes and slowed her breathing. She didn’t want to confront him. She didn’t want to tell him no, when just a few days ago she’d so enthusiastically told him yes.

  His steps came toward her, the slow, painful steps of a wounded man. She smelled not whiskey but the repulsive breath of a drinker at the end of a long drunk.

  “My own,” James said, close beside the bed. “My sweet.”

  Amanda didn’t answer.

  “Sweeting.”

  She felt a tug at the comforter. Fingertips stroked her hair. His reek made her gag. “I’m tired,” she murmured drowsily. “The trip over here, you know… .”

  “Ah yes, the boat a mere cockleshell in Neptune’s mighty hand. But we have come at last safely to Dundreggan. It is much changed, I fear.”

  “Mmmph,” she said.

  His icy hand grasped her shoulder, his fingers digging into her flesh. She shuddered, and not necessarily from the cold. “Have you cha
nged, Amanda? Here, amid the lying tongues of my relations, Isabel changed.”

  “James, stop it.” She wrenched away and turned toward him.

  His scarlet coat and blue and green tartan were translucent against the shadows. His eyes were cool and expressionless. “Amanda,” he sighed, his voice only a wisp of sound, “my own, you have cut me to the quick.”

  And he was gone.

  Damn it, he made her feel like it was her fault. Well it was, some of it. But only some.

  Downstairs, muffled by walls and corridors, the dog barked and then quieted. Amanda lay back down. She’d done what James asked—she’d found the sword, she’d brought him home, she’d told his story. Except the sword was in a display case. His home was in the hands of Archibald’s descendants. The story she’d told hadn’t been the one he wanted her to tell.

  Funny how she was looking forward to tomorrow’s funeral like a kid looking forward to Christmas morning.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Lindley Duncan pitched his voice against the wind, and his usually mild tones took on the resonance appropriate to the ancient words. “Man, that is born of woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

  The open grave was a damp, dark gash in the green grass of the churchyard, a miniature of the excavation crater at Melrose. Surely, Amanda thought, it’d been years since James’s bones and James’s presence emerged from the Virginia mud like a tormented butterfly from its chrysalis. But it hadn’t even been three weeks.

  “In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased.”

  Beyond James’s grave sprouted the headstones of several generations of Grants. The older ones tilted wearily to the side, their flowing inscriptions barely legible. The words on the newer ones were cut more sharply, small square letters recording sentiments ranging from sappy to dignified. Just to Amanda’s right stood the newest headstone, that of Alexander Grant. Its polished granite surface glowed in the clouded light. Both Norah and Malcolm took more than one solemn peek at it.

  “Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer.”

  Beyond the weather-smoothed stone of the Celtic cross each succeeding fold of land seemed more ethereal, green fading to blue, blue to gray, gray at last blending with the overcast sky. The flush of purple on the nearer hills was a pale reflection of the purple clerical stole fluttering around the neck of Duncan’s coat.

  The landscape had the soft edges and indirect lighting of a dream. Amanda felt like she’d been in a fever dream—summer in Virginia was pretty feverish, after all—and was only now waking up, numb and bleary-eyed, as the cold wind of sanity slapped her cheeks.

  Duncan bent, picked up a clod of earth, and threw it onto the coffin. “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  The air thickened with a fine mist, not quite heavy enough to fall as rain. Amanda hoped the moisture didn’t smudge the lenses of the cameras the way her eyes were smudged by a furtive tear or two, so that the greens, blues, and purples smeared and ran. What hurt most of all was that her tears were more relief than sorrow.

  Malcolm switched the video camera to his left arm and briefly squeezed Amanda’s hand between the flapping tails of their jackets. Norah stared into the grave. The Finlays shifted from side to side. The older John MacRae, serving as sexton, leaned on his shovel and peered into the sky, probably wondering how long he’d have to fill in the grave before the heavens opened up.

  “I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, write, from henceforth blessed are the dead who die in the Lord: even so saith the spirit; for they rest from their labors.”

  Maybe that was why James had been sent back from the dead, not for revenge but for redemption. He’d done his time in purgatory, paying for his living excesses by revealing the weakness that had driven them. Whether that grudging revelation, soaked in booze and denial, was enough to open the Pearly Gates for him Amanda couldn’t say. But she suspected she’d learned more from James’s time in purgatory than he had.

  “The Lord be with you,” said Duncan.

  Malcolm and Norah responded, “And with thy spirit.”

  “Let us pray. Our father who art in heaven… .”

  Amanda’s lips moved silently with the prayer. She hadn’t thought of prayer earlier, in the great hall of Dundreggan Castle, when Duncan shifted the bones from their wooden crate to a small coffin and Calum Finlay screwed down its lid. She hadn’t felt any sense of loss seeing James’s physical remains for the last time. They were only bones, gnawed clean of passion. The words that had come to her mind were those of the song, “When day is over and my life is done, my eyes have closed and my strength is gone …”

  Malcolm threw dirt onto the coffin. The Finlays did the same. Norah threw down one red rose, not the scarlet of James’s coat but crimson, like his blood spilled in an alien land. His blood spilled so uselessly.

  Amanda reached down, took an icy clod of soil, and dropped it onto the coffin. It made a hollow thunk, as though the box were empty. In spite of everything, she wished James peace. Good-bye. It was a heck of an adventure. Thank you.

  “May almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless you and keep you, for now and evermore.” Duncan’s voice thinned and was gone. The wind keened a lament through the grass, the stones, and the vacant windows of the ancient chapel. Amanda was cold. She clenched her jaw.

  “You may take the photographs now, if you wish,” Duncan said.

  “Thank you,” said Amanda between her teeth. She took pictures of the churchyard and the landscape, but she couldn’t bring herself to take any of the pitiful hole in the ground. Then she lowered the still camera and Malcolm taped the entire group re-enacting the Lord’s Prayer. The whirs and clicks seemed to cheapen the moment. But then, if Cynthia hadn’t set up the photo-op trip, James would never have come home and the truth would never have come out. Trust Cynthia to do the right thing, even if the way she did it drove you up the wall.

  By the time Amanda and Malcolm had enough pictures the rain was falling in earnest. The Finlays hurried to their car. “Will you be at the ceilidh tonight?” Duncan asked Norah as he folded his stole into his pocket.

  “Yes. I promised to bring scones.”

  “Lovely. I’ll see you there.” Duncan, too, drove away.

  Malcolm opened the door of his green Land Rover for Amanda, who hung back politely for Norah, who shoved Amanda into the front seat and out of the rain. “What’s a—is it a kay-lee?” Amanda asked, fumbling the unfamiliar word.

  “It’s spelt c-e-i-l-i-d-h,” said Malcolm, “just to confuse the outlanders.”

  “It’s a party,” Norah answered from the back. “Music and dancing. I’m afraid Saturday night is upon us, funeral or no funeral.”

  Malcolm slammed his door and started the engine. “It’s traditional to be havin’ a wake after a funeral, if you’d care to take that point o’ view. If you’d care to come along, we’d be pleased to have you.”

  “Well, James was a party animal,” Amanda said. “I’d like to come, thank you.”

  “It’s a date, then.” Malcolm put the car in gear and drove jouncing down the narrow track from the chapel.

  Amanda glanced back to see MacRae shoveling in the same rhythm as the Land Rover’s windshield wipers, brisk and steady. James’s parents’ and brother’s graves were on the other side of the cemetery. But then, so were the graves of Isabel and Archibald. Not that it mattered. It was all over but the documentation.

  James’s funeral had been like his lovemaking, brief and to the point. But each experience was what she needed at the time—a skyrocket of passion in the depth of her dream and an elegy in cool silence at its end. So much for illusion, sexual, supernat
ural, or any other kind. Now she was going to do some serious exploration of the brave and very real world that was opening up in front of her.

  Past Dundreggan’s antique gate was parked an orange-striped police car. “Well, well,” said Malcolm with a glance at his mother, “and what does the local polis want wi’ us the day?”

  “To borrow electric flex for the ceilidh, like as not,” said Norah.

  They scurried through the rain into the house. Voices came from the kitchen, Calum’s and Irene’s musical cadences in harmony with slightly flatter masculine voice. “Denny is Newcastle born and bred,” Malcolm explained. “But he saw the light and moved house to God’s country.”

  Smiling, Norah led the way into the kitchen. Irene was just putting the kettle on. Calum was reaming and stuffing his pipe. Cerberus, Denis, and Margaret waited expectantly in front of the refrigerator.

  Against the cabinet leaned a small, slender man in official navy blue, his cap under his arm. The severe cut of his salt and pepper hair didn’t tame the exuberance of his gray moustache. When he smiled his eyes and cheeks etched themselves with fine crinkles.

  “Good morning, Denny,” Norah said. “Or has it gone noon? You’ll take lunch with us, won’t you?”

  “It’s noon, right enough. But as for lunch, no, thank you, I’m needed at the village hall to set up the speakers for the band.”

  “The extra flex is in the back,” Malcolm told him. “I’ll fetch it.”

  “Thank you, Malcolm, but that’s not why I’m here. I need to talk to your guest.” His dark eyes swept Amanda up and down as though assessing her aptitude for criminality. If she’d had an overdue library book he’d have spotted it.

  Amanda braced herself. Incoming… .

  “Denny,” said Norah, “this is Amanda Witham. Amanda, this is Police Constable Gibson.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Amanda said politely if not quite truthfully.

  “How do you do,” returned Gibson. He pulled himself to attention, reached into his pocket, and pulled out what looked like a fax. “You are employed at Melrose Hall by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation?”