“Wish for me to marry you? He intended no compliment to you, I am sure of that.” Elizabeth smiled, a smile more fierce than humorous, and for just a moment Pilbeam was reminded of her father, King Henry.
Robert’s handsome face lit with the answer to the puzzle. “If Your Majesty marries an Englishman, she could not ally herself with a foreign power such as France against Spain.”
True enough, thought Pilbeam. But more importantly, if Elizabeth married Robert then she would give weight to the rumors of murder, and might even be considered his accomplice in that crime. She had reigned for only two years, her rule was far from secure. Marrying Lord Robert might give the discontented among her subjects more ammunition for their misbegotten cause, and further Philip’s plots. Whilst Robert chose to ignore those facts, Pilbeam would wager everything he owned that Her Majesty did not. His lordship’s ambition might have outpaced his love for his wife. His love for Elizabeth had certainly done so. No, Robert Dudley had not killed his wife. Not intentionally.
The Queen stroked his cheek, the coronation ring upon her finger glinting against his beard. “The problem, sweet Robin, is that I am already married to a husband, namely, the Kingdom of England.”Robert had no choice but to acknowledge that. He bowed.
“Have the maidservant released,” Elizabeth commanded. “Allow the cozeners to go free. Let the matter rest, and in time it will die for lack of nourishment. And then Philip and his toadies will not only be deprived of their conclusion, they will always wonder how much we knew of their plotting, and how we knew it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Lord Robert. “May I then return to court?”
“In the course of time.” She dropped her hand from his cheek.
He would never have his conclusion, either, thought Pilbeam. Elizabeth would like everyone to be in love with her, but she would never be in love with anyone enough to marry him. For then she would have to bow her head to her husband’s will, and that she would never do.
Pilbeam backed away. For once he did not collide with Martin, who, he saw with a glance from the corner of his eye, was several paces away and sidling crab-wise toward the door.
Again the Queen turned the full force of her eyes upon Pilbeam, stopping him in his steps. “Dr. Pilbeam, we hear that the ghost of Lady Robert Dudley has been seen walking in Cumnor Park.”
“Ah, ah. . . .” Pilbeam felt rather than saw Martin’s shudder of terror. But they would never have discovered the truth without the revenant. No, he would not condemn Martin, not when his carelessness had proved a blessing in disguise.
Lord Robert’s gaze burned the side of his face, a warning that matters of necromancy were much better left hidden. “Her ghost?” he demanded. “Walking in Cumnor Park?”
Pilbeam said, “Er—ah—many tales tell of ghosts rising from their graves, Your Majesty, compelled by matters left unconcluded at death. Perhaps Lady Robert is seeking justice, perhaps bewailing her fate. In the course time, some compassionate clergyman will see her at last to rest.” Not I, he added firmly to himself.
Elizabeth’s smile glinted with wry humor. “Is that how it is?”
She would not insult Pilbeam by pretending that she had no spies in Oxfordshire as well, and that very little failed to reach her ears and eyes. And yet the matter of the revenant, too, she would let die for lack of nourishment. She was not only fair in appearance, but also in her expectations. He made her a bow that was more of a genuflection.
She made an airy wave of her hand. “You may go now, all of you. And Dr. Pilbeam, Lord Robert will be giving you the purse that dangles at his belt, in repayment of his debt to you.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” His lordship backed reluctantly away.
What an interesting study in alchemy, thought Pilbeam, that with the Queen the base metal of his lordship’s manner was transmuted to gold. “Your Majesty. My Lord.” Pilbeam reversed himself across the floor and out the door, which Martin contrived to open behind his back. Lord Robert followed close upon their heels, his boots stepping as lightly and briskly as the hooves of a thoroughbred.
A few moments later Pilbeam stood in the street, an inspiringly heavy purse in his hand, allowing himself a sigh of relief—ah, the free air was sweet, all was well that ended well. . . . Martin stepped into a puddle, splashing the rank brew of rainwater and sewage onto the hem of Pilbeam’s robe.
Pilbeam availed himself yet again of Martin’s convenient handle. “You rank pottle-deep measle! You rude-growing toad!” he exclaimed, and guided the lad down the street toward the warmth and peace of home.
Author’s Note
“The Necromancer’s Apprentice” first appeared in Murder by Magic, edited by Rosemary Edghill, Aspect/Warner, 2004, and was reprinted in The Adventure of the Missing Detective and 19 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, Carroll & Graf, 2005, and in The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told, Edited by Martin H. Greeberg, Skyhorse Publishing, 2010.
The assignment for this anthology was to mix mystery and fantasy. Again, I dithered for awhile. Then I saw a period etching in The Idiot’s Guide to Ghosts and Hauntings (there’s an Idiot’s Guide to just about everything) depicting Elizabethan sorcerer John Dee speaking to a ghost, i.e. committing necromancy. Aha!
Just as some of the characters in Tudor history are larger than life—how Robert Dudley managed to die in bed is beyond me—some of the events are stranger than fiction. For example, writers and historians have been puzzling over Amy Robsart’s death for 450 years now. All I had to do was use Dee to give a supernatural twist to the story.
Except, I discovered, Dee himself wasn’t in England at the time of Robsart’s death. No problem. Inventing an assistant for him was great fun. So was getting some actual spell-casting of the time from The Oxford Book of the Supernatural. As for generating colorful curses from a website—one from column A, two from column B—what could be easier?
Everyone mentioned in the story, except for Pilbeam, Martin, and the maid, Lettice, were actual historical characters, including the two cozeners.
The Muse
Kate had always threatened to run away, and now she’d done it. She’d run until she reached the end of the Earth. . . .
Well no, she thought, second-guessing herself yet again. This hotel wasn’t at the end of the Earth. The Earth went on forever, round and round, until you passed yourself struggling along the road. What she’d come to was the end of her wits.
Through the window of the lounge she saw a green lawn stretching down to a bay, where jagged black rocks looked like spears thrust into the silvery sand of the beach. On a promontory to the left stood a ruined castle, its broken walls and towers rising from the rock the way memory, desire, and regret rose in the back of Kate’s mind. From the far horizon rose the humped peaks of the Outer Hebrides, blue against the only slightly less solid blue of the sky. Huge white and gray clouds sailed overhead.
Behind her dishes clattered. Kate looked around. Of course she’d ordered tea. Here, tea was as much medication as beverage.
The waitress was a young woman with the ample figure of a Mediterranean mother-goddess figurine. A name tag reading “Lucy” clung to the fabric above her breast like a skier poised for a downhill run. She set the tea tray down with a smile.
Kate picked up the metal teapot and almost dropped it. “Whoa, it’s hot!”
“Oh aye,” Lucy agreed, and started collecting the empty cups from the next table.
Her fingertips tingling, Kate poured, added milk and sugar and started to drink. Steam rose from the cup, misting her glasses. No, she’d scald her mouth. Better wait.
She pulled her notebook out of her purse and opened it to the first page. A blank page, each ruled line like the bars of a cell. She held her pencil poised above the paper, waiting for inspiration, or, failing that, gravity, to pull it downward.
“You’re a writer then?” asked Lucy.
“No, not really.”
“
Getting the words down, that’s magic.” Lucy vanished out the door.
Magic, Kate repeated silently.
She’d spent years nurturing the dreams of others. Her own had been set aside, if not forgotten, reduced to a few words furtively jotted down on the back of the grocery list or a note from the school. Those words that managed to rise above the level of furtive had earned a handful of rejection slips which she’d hidden away like her kids tried to do with a bad report card.
Now, the children were grown and the husband shed, all very politely, very civilized—there was nothing wrong with the marriage, its shelf life had simply expired. Now Kate had come at last to Scotland, to the island of Skye, chasing the myth and legend she craved—Dunvegan, with its stories of fairy flags and pipers playing unearthly music, or Dunscaith with its stories of a warrior queen.
And here she was at an ordinary little hotel on the farthest rim of the island. Here she was just as trapped as if she’d stayed home.
Outside the ocean was a sheen of sunlight on indigo. Waves ran in to the beach, one after the other, paling to green and then, as the elements of air and water mingled, becoming a creamy froth licking at the sand. The ocean’s rhythmic murmur mingled with the rattle of crockery from the nether regions of the hotel. Kate imagined a housewife having sex and planning the next day’s meals at the same time.
With a wry shake of her head she tried the tea again. Its milky-sweet heat warmed her body. Thirstily she drank the pot dry. Then she put the still-virgin notebook away.
She found Lucy installed behind the front desk in the hall—she wasn’t just waitress, it seemed, but owner, operator, and presiding genius as well. “How much for the tea?”
“Two pound.”
Kate handed over two heavy pound coins, like the coins the ancient Greeks would put on the eyes of the dead so their souls could pay for the ferry into Hades.
“Thank you,” said Lucy. “Are you away, then?”
“Yes, thanks,” Kate returned, with more certainty than she felt. “Where’s the rest room, please?”
“Eh?”
“The lavatory? The loo?”
“Oh. Just there.” Lucy nodded toward a sign on the wall reading brusquely, “toilets”.
Kate found the ladies’ off a back corridor. The toilet had a tank high on the wall, activated by a pull handle. In the US it’d be draped with a velvet rope, for exhibition only, not for use.
This was meant to be used. Had been used, as a matter of fact—shit smeared the inside of the bowl. How odd for a women’s toilet. It was the male of the species who usually marked his territory so casually, unafraid to make a mess. The female of the species, now, was a lot more squeamish about squatting down and confessing to mortality.
What if Lucy was the next woman to come in here? What if she thought it was Kate who’d left the toilet so dirty? Kate pulled the handle, but even the rush of water couldn’t wash away the consequences of appetite.
When she walked out of the front door of the hotel the cold sea wind hit her cheeks like a slap. Thanks, I needed that. The afternoon sun hung in the northern sky. The islands on the horizon were more dream than real. Now what? Should she take a ferry across to that horizon or keep on cleaning toilets?
Music ebbed and flowed on the wind like the tide on the beach, aching like a broken heart. Kate looked around, past the black and white sign reading “Kilcolm Hotel” to the castle on its headland.
Human figures moved through the ruins. A piper must be playing there, like the costumed pipers who played outside Urquhart Castle or in Glencoe. It was a fair exchange—they were hungry for the tourist bucks, marks, francs, yen, and the tourists were hungry for a mythical past.
The shrill music was ancient, wild, uncanny, both a banshee’s wail and Ulysses’ sirens’ compelling call. Turning away from the parking lot and the beach, Kate followed a muddy path upward. To her right the breakers foamed around stones sharp as teeth. Ahead of her rose the walls of the castle, stained with the same lichens and bird-droppings as the bedrock. She couldn’t tell where one ended and where the other began. Maybe the castle hadn’t been built but grown.
White seabirds whirled above the ruins, screeching brashly. The music stopped. Kate stepped through the shadow of an archway onto a green lawn no larger than the hotel lounge.
Around her the walls rose from battered parapets to a three story tower, its windows dark slits, its roofline a serrated edge against the sky. Pinkish-purple foxgloves sprouted from crannies where the rock had shifted and split. The icy wind couldn’t quite overwhelm the castle’s miasma of mud, mold, and seaweed. Well, not all castles could be Camelot, edited again and again over the years.
At the base of the tower two men equipped with hard hats and clipboards huddled beside an arch traced in stone—oh, a filled-in doorway. Several people stood braced, figurehead-style, on top of the walls. Below them the cliff fell sheer to the sea. Back home a place like this would have railings and warning signs. If someone slipped and fell you might get hit with a lawsuit. You had to be careful. If you took risks, you could get hurt. And if you did get hurt it was always someone else’s fault.
Music burst behind Kate’s back. The rush of sound pulled every follicle on her body erect. In a spasm of something between terror and delight, she spun around.
There was the piper, standing beside the gate just where sun met shadow. His short-cropped red hair rippled in the wind and his red and green kilt fluttered around his knees. Strong knees, solid thighs, calves curving smoothly into thick woolen socks and sturdy boots—his clothing was not costume but everyday wear.
His body was so lean and wiry Kate was surprised he could expel enough air to inflate the bag nestled against his denim jacket. But Gabriel’s trumpet would probably emit fewer decibels. He was playing a lament, an intricate, almost tuneless series of notes in a minor key. Each note lingered so long, drawing itself out thinner and thinner, or else darted somewhere so unexpected, Kate felt unbalanced. She took an abrupt step forward.
The corner of his mouth tilted slightly even as his lips stayed firm on the mouthpiece. Long eyebrows arched up and down, one after the other, above startlingly blue eyes. Embarrassed at staring, she found two more pound coins and dropped them into the shortbread tin at his feet with a sound like that of an anchor chain rattling down.
He glanced at them, the sunlight glinting off the gold hoop in his ear, then looked up and winked. Kate essayed a weak smile. His eyes smiled back. She felt the reverberation of the drones in her stomach and the melody of the chanter down her back, as though the piper was fingering her spine instead of his instrument.
She forced herself to make an about-face and walk away across the tongue of turf enclosed by the ruined walls.
A uniformed guide ushered two people through the gate. “So where is this?” demanded the middle-aged man in a flat American accent. His toad-like shape was remarkably similar to that of the elderly woman who held his arm. Mother and son, probably. “Anything happen here?”
“This is Dunshian Castle,” the guide recited. “Here a chief of the MacDonalds forced his daughter to marry a chief of clan MacLeod. She had two sons, MacDonald’s only grandchildren. One day the MacDonald and his son-in-law returned from the hunt. The daughter cooked and served them up a feast, there, in the hall...” He gestured toward the tower. The two faces turned upward, maybe imagining a long torchlit room hung with tapestries when even at its finest this castle’s hall would have been barely warmer and dryer than its dungeon. And yet its occupants probably sat there saying, “Life can’t get any better than this.”
“When they’d eaten,” the guide concluded, “the daughter, the wife, the mother told the men she’d served them up her sons. Then she threw herself out the window onto the rocks below.”
The tourists’ eyes glittered. “Is that true?”
“Oh aye, that it is.”
Sure it was true, Kate thought. A true story, even if the events had never actually happened.
> “Then there was Hugh MacDonald, accused of plotting against his cousin. The cousin locked him up in a dungeon with a plate of salt beef and a pitcher. Hugh ate the beef and turned to the pitcher. It was empty. They say he went mad from the thirst before he died of it. But he never confessed.”
The tourists grimaced happily. There was nothing quite so entertaining as a ghastly event that happened to someone else, reminding you life could always get worse.
The piper ended his lament with a long drawn-out note like a moan, the sound fading and dying. Birds shrieked. One of the men by the blocked door tapped his trowel against the stone. Kate wondered if they were archaeologists, in quest of the physical rather than the metaphysical past.
“Then,” guide said, “there was the wee woman tourist who saw a ghostly army marching across the grounds of the hotel, just there.”
“Oooh,” said the mother. But that was a little close to home. “It’s getting late, we need to be going, we have dinner reservations in Portree.”
“Right,” said the guide, pulling a set of car keys from his pocket.
Kate didn’t know about her compatriots, but she’d never pass another golden-arches-type McDonald’s without remembering Dunshian and its gastronomical horror stories. There was more to eating than fueling the flesh.
The piper launched into a reel. In the music was the coil and swoop of the sea birds, the melody returning again and again to the same double note of affirmation, joyful in spite of—or because—of its minor key. Kate had to keep herself from breaking into dance step.
Even the lumpish tourists shuffled a bit as they headed toward the gate. The guide said, “A piper was playing for a wedding on a Saturday night. The guests feasted and danced. When it came midnight and the Sabbath, the minister warned them to stop. They didn’t. And the guests turned to stones, all standing in a circle round the tall one that’s the piper.”
With a dubious glance at Dunshian’s far-from-petrified piper, the tourists vanished out the gate. They didn’t throw any money into the tin. Kate groped in her handbag—you had to pay the piper. You had to recognize the power and magic of music, even if, like the mythical minister, you were jealous of it. Even if you thought you had to protect your flock from their own instincts.
The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth Page 28