Jean knew only too well that her curious nature had developed a tendency to suspicion. Still, Lovelace had as much as admitted he was hiding something from her. Whether it was anything as straightforward as a medical condition he didn’t want to reveal, or something more—sinister, if that wasn’t too strong a word—she had no way of knowing. Yet.
For just a moment she wondered, why me? Then she ordered herself to can the paranoia. Lovelace’s simply was not the let-it-all-hang-out generation. He was being careful of his sensibilities. She’d have to be, too. Like a priest or a lawyer, she was now in possession of privileged information.
Miranda lay in wait in the door of her office, her blond crest of hair tilted forward eagerly. “What was he on about?”
“He found a gold coin from Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Lochaber hoard, and since I wrote that article on Charlie last month, he wants me to do the treasure trove legwork for him. At least, that’s his story.”
“Bonnie Prince Charlie? Gold hoard?” Klieg lights shone in Miranda’s eyes. She grasped Jean’s arm, pulling her into the room. “His story?”
“What he told me of it, not exactly chapter and verse.”
“Of course he’s not telling you the entire story. He’s not after giving away the location of thousands of gold coins.”
“It’s not that he wouldn’t tell me where he found the coin, it was more his body language and that he said. . . .” Jean told her own sensibilities to calm down, already. Lovelace had an ulterior motive. She didn’t know what it was. Period. “I can write a good article without knowing the intimate details, let alone naming names.”
“There you are, then.” Miranda inspected her overstuffed bookshelf. She always found what she was looking for, Jean thought admiringly, even though her office looked like an archaeological dig. Magic, probably.
Miranda pulled out an atlas. “The barrels of coins were hidden where? Lochaber?”
“The western Highlands north and west of Fort William, anywhere from Loch Arkaig to Loch Linnhe to the sea. Rough country, even today.”
“Bonnie Prince Charlie country. The prince in the heather and his buried treasure. There’s a brilliant marketing hook for you. You can make a start with an article, then do up a book—loads of photographs, interviews, and the like. Ghost stories as well. You’re always turning up the ghosts. They come to you like bees to honey.”
“Not on command they don’t,” Jean pointed out. Miranda was one of the very few people who knew of what she called her paranormal allergy, although it was more curse than joke.
“We’ll post an excerpt on the website, with a click-and-order for the book. And a tour, do you think. . . .”
“Whoa!” Lovelace might ramble, but talking to Miranda could be like careening through Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. “Let me get the coin authenticated first. Not that I think Lovelace made it in his basement. Whatever he’s up to is more subtle than that.”
Miranda’s manicured fingertips drummed on a map. “Western Highlands. Lochaber. The Road to the Isles. Loch Arkaig. Well then, here’s a bit of luck. Glendessary House is just there, along the loch. An interview would go down a treat.”
“An interview with a house?”
“With the new owner. A dot-com billionaire keen on owning a bit of the Auld Sod. He’s taken Glendessary House, the hunting lodge on the north side of the loch, and done it up something posh. I met him last autumn during the Season. He’s a bit cracked, I’m thinking.”
“Or,” Jean suggested, “since he’s filthy rich, eccentric.”
“Eccentric. He is that, aye. Most Yanks buy themselves a title and ponce about in society circles, Lord-this, Lady-that, but not him. MacLyon keeps to himself with a small circle of friends, I hear. Very exclusive.”
“I know who you’re talking about, sort of, but I couldn’t remember his name. When I asked Lovelace about him, he said something about everyone in the area knowing the man, that he was one of the local celebrities. I got the feeling he wasn’t thrilled by the proximity. . . . Oh my.”
“Aye?” Miranda asked.
“What if Lovelace found the coin on MacLyon’s property? Maybe that’s why he was being so cautious. It sounds like he needs the money and MacLyon doesn’t. I don’t want to betray the old guy’s confidence or get him into trouble—but I’m sure not going to cover anything up.”
“Mind you,” Miranda counseled in turn, “the coin wants authentication first.”
Once again Jean tamped down her questions, an activity equivalent to herding cats. “Then I’ll take it over to the Museum right now. I’m not going to find out anything more about it—or about Lovelace—until I do.”
“Away you go, then. I’ll have the lad organize a hire car and book you a room in Fort William tomorrow night. No need to hang about.” Miranda closed the atlas with a decisive thump. “This looks to be a grand story and no mistake. We’ll plot strategy the morn, eh? Half-past eight.”
Tomorrow, Jean thought. Fort William. A secretive old man. A historic coin. An eccentric billionaire. This was getting away from her. She wasn’t in Jekyll and Hyde, she was in Treasure Island. At least Lovelace didn’t have one leg and a parrot on his shoulder. Shaking her head, she offered her friend a backhanded British salute, said “Aye, aye, Captain,” and headed down the hall.
If Miranda’s office had once been a drawing room, Jean’s was what had once been called a closet. The desk and two chairs filled the few square feet of floor space, leaving space only for narrow shelves crammed with books, magazines, maps, leaflets, and manuscripts. And the window. But she didn’t begrudge Miranda the larger office and the responsibility that came with it. Being the silent partner in Great Scot, Ltd.—the sleeping partner, in Britspeak—suited her just fine. She was, after all, only a mild-mannered academic. Most of the time.
It was Miranda who’d turned her journalism degree into a trans-Atlantic career. On the way, she’d gathered the skills, the contacts, and the cash to rescue a moribund magazine, expand it into a mini-publishing empire, and plant it firmly in the twenty-first century. Jean expected that soon she’d find the Capaldi coat of arms, which Miranda had duly ordered and paid for, installed above the Castle drawbridge in the same fashion as the Nokia Sugar Bowl or 3Com Stadium. The Capaldi Castle. It had a ring to it.
So far, though, Miranda sponsored only this four-hundred year old building. Jean was just now getting used to floors that creaked and plumbing that groaned and the occasional silken whisper in the hall, which at first she’d thought was the swish of ghostly hoop skirts but which had turned out to be a draft rustling the racks of newspapers. If any spirits lingered here, they murmured so faintly behind the wainscoting that her sixth sense couldn’t hear them.
Which was just as well. The occasional ghost that she could sense was quite enough to make her see herself as—hypersensitive. Eccentric, even. But not cracked. At times she felt almost too sane.
Supposedly artifacts could be haunted, but that sensation was not one Jean had ever experienced. Still, she spent a long moment contemplating the gold coin in its box on her desk. She imagined the French ship sailing silently into Loch nan Uamh in May of 1746, barely a fortnight after Charles Stuart’s cause had come to a grisly end on the battlefield of Culloden. She saw sweating men and pack animals trundling the barrels of gold up into the hills, even as their prince himself wandered destitute through the country whose crown he’d claimed but failed to win.
She saw Charles at last meeting another French ship and making his escape. Until the end of his life, forty years later, he’d believed Scotland was ready to rise again in his family’s name. He’d been wrong. But then, being right hadn’t exactly been Bonnie Prince Charlie’s strong point.
Reality was never all it was cracked up to be. Knowing that, Jean told herself, was both a drawback and an advantage to working in the history business.
She put the lid on the coin box and the box into her small backpack. A dash of lipstick, a tug of her comb through her short, na
turally surly hair, and she was ready to go. In her younger days she’d been so afraid of being the type of girl who “had a good personality” she’d fussed over her hair and her clothes. Now she hadn’t so much let herself go as met herself halfway, letting her comfort zone find its own level. Occasionally she felt like the sale rack next to Miranda’s window display, but then, Miranda liked to shop and Jean didn’t, so that was that.
On her way out, Jean stopped by the reception desk. Gavin looked fifteen in spite of claiming to twenty. His very proper suit and tie had obviously been handed down from an older and larger relative. Contemplating an Internet listing of car rental agencies, he asked, “Any particular sort of car you’re wanting, then?”
“Something larger than a tin can and smaller than a tank.”
He looked up at her, eyes dancing. “Well that narrows the field a bit.”
“Mid-size, two-door, decent gas mileage,” Jean told him. “Gas stations can be few and far between in the Highlands.”
“Gas, is it then? Are you not wanting one that runs on petrol?”
She resisted the impulse to ruffle his hair, said, “Thank you, Gavin,” and headed toward the turnpike stair.
Halfway down, she met the postman coming up. She turned sideways and balanced on the narrower side of the treads as he passed by, greeting him with a breezy, “Hi! How’s it going?” His return mumble seemed a bit forced. It wasn’t until Jean reached the bottom of the steps that she remembered that passing someone on a spiral staircase was considered bad luck.
Don’t, she ordered herself, go looking for omens. This was going to be a grand story, and no mistake.
CHAPTER THREE
Jean emerged from the cool, slightly musty building and turned her face to the warmth of the sun. Now there was a new habit. After two decades in Texas, she’d gotten used to either hiding from the sun or trudging along in dumb misery as her skin fried and her eyeballs frizzled. But not here, no. Here sunshine was a blessing.
To Jean’s right the buildings on either side of the street dwindled to a slit packed with a slice of the Castle. To her left the Royal Mile snaked downhill, two banks of storefronts, historical façades, and sidewalk cafes channeling a roaring stream of traffic. Beside her, a plump middle-aged couple draped in L. L. Bean safari gear—they might just as well have been wearing placards reading American!—hesitated outside the tartan-draped doorway of a shop. A tartan-clad clerk pounced. “I’ll have a look, just see if we’ve got your family tartan, shall I?”
The couple could be named anything from Alvarez to Zimmerman, and the shop would carry their family tartan. Jean would say that merchant and tourist alike were participating in a role-playing game that went cheerfully on, over, around, and through real life, except searching for your identity, whether on a personal or a national level, was real life.
She darted across the street and around the corner onto the George IV Bridge, which, from this perspective, looked like just another building-lined street rather than a viaduct crossing a ravine. Ahead rose the new Museum of Scotland. The sleek curves and angles of its walls, part ancient castle and part futuristic bunker, made a stark contrast to the intricacies of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings surrounding it. So did its stone, shades of amber as yet unstained by the smokes of the city.
Jean paused at the front desk and asked the guard to call up to Michael Campbell-Reid’s office. Then she genuflected before the words of the Declaration of Arbroath painted in foot-high letters in the entrance hall: “It is not for glory or riches or honours that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life.”
Or any good woman. Not that the Scots, men and women both, hadn’t through bad luck or bad choices lost their liberty repeatedly. The struggle for freedom was as eternal as that for identity, and as likely to include illusion. But then, playing illusion off reality was as much the Scottish national pastime as nursing old wounds and rehearsing old glories. Jean found the Scots’ edgy self-awareness to be as stimulating as it was annoying, both grandly romantic and chip-on-the-shoulder petty. It all depended on the perspective.
She made her way past the familiar displays to a door leading to the rear echelon and found Michael waiting for her. “Jean! Hello!”
“How’s it going?”
“Overworked and underpaid as ever,” he replied with a grin and a firm handshake. He inserted his key card, pushed the door open, and waved her through a nondescript hallway into an elevator.
At any other time in her life Jean would have found Michael’s dashing good looks as compelling as chocolate. But even if she had been in the market for eligible males, Michael wouldn’t have qualified. He was as married a man as Jean had ever met. “How’s the family?” she asked.
“Waiting to say hello,” Michael said. “Rebecca’s just come from Holyrood, brought in a ring needs cleaning. . . .”
The elevator doors opened. Michael’s wife was reading the notices on the bulletin board just outside.
“. . . it being a bonny day for a dauner with the bairn and all,” he concluded.
“She’s not a bairn yet,” retorted Rebecca. “The word means ‘born,’ I’m thinking. Hey, Jean, how are you?”
“Great. Enjoying the pretty day myself.”
“Have we seen you since we decided on the baby’s name?”
“No. What’s it going to be? Mary, after your favorite sixteenth-century queen?”
“Linda, after my favorite twenty-first-century aunt.”
“That’s brilliant.” Jean made a face. After four months in Edinburgh, she had to make a conscious effort to speak in her own American accent.
Rebecca had been here three years. No surprise she spoke with a bit of a lilt and a burr. Whether her bright eyes and rosy cheeks could be attributed to the Scottish air, pregnancy, or her Midwestern American upbringing Jean had no way of knowing. What she did know was that Rebecca’s insightful smile complemented Michael’s eager intelligence.
And his sense of humor. Thumping on her rounded abdomen, he pronounced, “Not quite ripe. We’d best be giving the wee one two more months.”
“Is that an imperial or an editorial ‘we,’ Michael?” Rebecca waddled through a light, spacious area filled with tables and chairs to Michael’s book-lined office, where she lowered herself into the desk chair. “And how are you enjoying life in Scotland, Jean?”
“Very much, now that I’ve survived the winter.”
“Oh aye,” Michael said. “Scotland’s not for the squeamish.”
“Neither are the Scots,” added Rebecca with a glance at her husband.
He drew himself up, exuding dignity. “And what’s bringing you in the day, Jean? A new article for the magazine?”
“More or less, yes. I have something that needs to be authenticated.” She pulled the white box from her backpack.
“It’s a box, right enough,” Michael said.
Jean opened it with a flourish. “And inside is a gold Louis d’Or of seventeen-twenty.”
“Well, well, well.” Michael took the box and angled it so Rebecca could see the coin.
“Who turned it up?” she asked.
“An elderly English gentleman named George Lovelace. Not that he wants his name spread around, you understand. He found it in Lochaber, not at all surprisingly.”
“You’re on the trail of Bonnie Prince Charlie, are you?” Michael set the box on a counter that ran the length of the small room, between a computer and a rack holding exhibition leaflets. Folding his long limbs onto a stool and pulling on a pair of cotton gloves, he hefted the coin, turned it over and around, and peered at it through a magnifying glass. “Your auld Sassenach was clever enough not to wash it. We’ve got bits of dirt—peat, most likely—fluff, a wee thread of some sort, several minor scratches. Did you pack it away in the box or did he do?”
“He brought it in the box. Looks like a jewelry box, actually.”
“He’s carried the coin about in his pocket
for a time.”
“When he first found it,” suggested Rebecca.
“I expect so.” Michael’s forehead creased in thought. “Lovelace, George. That name sounds familiar. Lives in Lochaber, you said?”
“I didn’t say, but yes, he lives in Corpach.”
“Corpach.” Michael waggled the mouse of his computer, waded through a couple of screens, typed in a password. “Oh aye. Just there.”
Rebecca was craning forward. “What?”
Over Michael’s shoulder, Jean could see the words, in plain pixilated English, “George Lovelace, 5 Beaton Terrace, Corpach.” What the . . . ?
“He brought in a Norse brooch last year,” explained Michael. “Said he turned it up on Skye. Not my department, mind, but I remember the announcement. The brooch was declared bona vacantia, ownerless goods, and of significant historical interest. I dinna ken how much we paid for it, but I’m guessing it was no small sum. No surprise Lovelace was motivated to look out more items.”
Jean’s perspective screeched, ran up the curb, and landed on its side. “He brought you a. . . . He knows the laws of treasure trove better than I do!”
“Maybe he thinks this way he won’t have to tell us where he found it,” Rebecca offered.
“But if he’s already dealt with you, he knows that eventually he’ll have to come out with the location.” Jean shook her head. “I knew he was hiding where he found the coin—and probably more than that—but this is weird.”
“That it is, not sensible at all.” Brows knit, Michael put the coin back in its box and replaced the lid, quenching the beguiling glimmer of gold.
“Maybe he found several coins,” Rebecca offered, “or at least knows more are there, and he wants to hand them over one at a time so as not to flood the market and bring down the price.”
“Or perhaps he found the coin on a protected site,” added Michael. “Did he say he turned it up on public land?”
The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1) Page 2