The air swirled in a slow eddy past her ears as Cameron inhaled. “Smoke. Not from a cigarette or a cigar. Burning timber.”
“Vanessa said this end of the house was the one most damaged in the fire.” Distantly Jean heard shouts and cries and the crackle of flames.
The ghost marched up the steps. Or where the steps had been during his life, offset from the contemporary ones. Even when he stood beneath the ceiling light he was perfectly visible, from bandage to belt to boots. And then he was gone, between one heartbeat and the next.
In the sudden silence the clock in the entrance hall struck ten. Jean exhaled, blowing the stink of smoke from her nostrils. Cameron’s body stood inches from hers. Before she could jerk away he dropped her arm, so emphatically he almost pushed her aside, and stepped back. She wondered if she’d have a bruise across her biceps from his grasp.
“Archie MacSorley,” he repeated. “How did you know that?”
“George had the same photo of the commandos in an album that the MacSorleys have in their living room. They have a close-up of Archie.”
“He was killed here, in training?”
“That’s what Miranda says. Feel free to look it up for yourself.”
“No need.”
Jean looked around, not knowing whether to hug him or hit him. “No snappy comebacks? No skepticism? Or have you known all this time you’re allergic to ghosts, too?”
“Well then,” he said, with a crimp of his mouth that was almost a rueful smile, “I suppose I was wrong about all the ghosts being tired. Not for those with eyes to see and hearts to know.” The like us hung unspoken in the air.
Suddenly Jean was dog-tired and bone-weary. She didn’t want to talk any more. She didn’t want to feel any more. She certainly didn’t want to explore whether her discomfort at seeing a ghost was equal to her discomfort at sharing something so private, so—intimate—with Alasdair Cameron. “Good night, Chief Inspector.”
“Good night, Miss Fairbairn.”
She sensed his aloof, almost bleak, eyes on her as she climbed the stairs and walked unscathed through the dark, cold spot where the ghost had vanished, but she didn’t look back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Parting the damask curtains, Jean leaned close to the window. The glass panes radiated cold. Outside the clouds hung low over the mountains, making them look less substantial than Archie MacSorley’s ghost. The sun might have risen in the sky, but the earth was swathed in gloom.
A Gothic sort of morning, sketched in shades of gray, suited Jean’s hungover mood perfectly. She’d lain awake for hours, brain spinning, senses wheezing. When she’d at last dozed off, she’d jerked awake at every noise, in spite of having locked her door and hooked the desk chair beneath the knob.
Doors opened. Doors shut. Several sets of footsteps walked up the hall, one of them stopping outside her room. The doorknob had turned, then fallen back. That hadn’t been a ghost. It sure hadn’t been the cat, either.
Now she turned on all the lights in the room, then brewed herself a pot of strong black tea and surveyed the selection of edibles. Crackers, oatmeal raisin cookies, and shortbread. Good, enough for a breakfast. Until it was time to at last get the goods on Rick, she intended to glory in solitude. And, with no music emanating from the sound system, in silence.
Her laptop humming, her notebook open, Jean began organizing her notes and with them, she hoped, her mind. The gold coin. The murder. The car wreck. The telephone call.
Whatever had happened between Cameron and Fiona might not matter. Irritating as the man could be, she had no evidence he couldn’t be trusted and a fair amount of evidence that he could. Even so, his allergy to ghosts was just one of those odd congruities of life, not a character reference. Plenty of people could see ghosts, if not on a regular basis. She’d just never shared a sighting with anyone else before, was all. . . . Well no, it wasn’t all. It was too much for her to wrap her mind around right now.
The history of the house. The portraits. The artifacts. Rick’s tartan fantasies. Pouring herself another cup of tea, Jean told herself that Rick MacLyon made his fortune writing and producing games. Not just fantasy games like Claymore, but historical campaigns where you could fight Bannockburn, Agincourt, or Waterloo over and over again. Was the Lodge a gaming group testing some beta version of a new Culloden game? If so, she’d expect its members to look, well, funkier.
A knock on the door made her look up. “Who is it?”
“Fiona. Breakfast is served at nine.”
“Thanks, Fiona, but I’m skipping breakfast today.”
“Very good.” The soft steps padded away.
Jean ate the last package of crackers—bland and blah, some salsa would have helped—and read through her notes. Maybe she could get another ghost article out of all this, too.
Had Archie been walking the ruins all these years, or had he returned to the house after its restoration? No surprise that he was walking—sudden, unexpected death could unsettle a man. Still, Jean wondered not only which aspect of Archie’s life had been left unfinished, so that he’d stay on in the last place he’d known, but also why his ghost was accompanied by echoes of the fire. Had he been brought to the infirmary wounded and then died in the blaze?
Vanessa was sensing Archie, in a low-resolution sort of way, not George. Did anyone else know he was there, especially his descendants Kieran and Neil? She replayed the scene, the shape in the shadows, the small dark empty eyes, the firm hand on her arm. . . .
Whoa. It was almost ten. Leaping up, Jean applied make-up, dressed in a skirt and sweater, and armed herself with notebook and laptop. Carpe diem, she pep-talked herself. Although there were some days that you seized and then dropped again, like a hot potato.
She moved the chair away from the door and stepped out into the hall. A faint miasma of burned sausage made her glad she’d passed on breakfast. Clarinda was stretched out on her love seat in front of the windows, utterly relaxed. Promising herself to get in touch with her inner feline as soon as possible, Jean headed on down the stairs.
The first person she saw was Alasdair Cameron. He stood in front of the clock, holding a coffee mug, his stance anything but relaxed. He looked around with a sober, “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Jean returned.
He looked a bit hungover himself, even though he was clean shaven and back in his coat and tie, the former charcoal gray, the latter a lush Book of Kells interlace pattern. His eyes were unadorned, hard and cold as polished steel. Seeing him warm up a bit last night had been like seeing cracks suddenly appear in the stone beneath Edinburgh Castle.
Cameron pitched his voice only a little above a whisper—for her ears only. “Andy brought Walsh back this morning. The mechanics at the garage agreed he’d been there with the MacSorley’s car, right enough, but they said the brakes worked a treat when he left.”
“He wouldn’t have messed with the brakes right in front of them,” Jean whispered back.
“That’s as may be, but it gives us nothing to charge him with.” Cameron drank thoughtfully from his mug. “Walsh is still saying he went to your hotel to blether about your writing. I’m thinking he’s lying.”
“If he’s not the killer himself, then he’s scared of who is.”
“Oh aye. And we’ll not be fainting in astonishment at that.”
Jean allowed herself a thin smile. “You think Kieran’s the killer?”
“No. He’s right out.”
“What?” she demanded, feeling houses of cards tumbling past her ears.
“We’ve turned up a witness who saw MacSorley jogging past the Clan Cameron Museum at two p.m. Tuesday.”
“Great.” Jean looked around—fake weapons, antlers, twin corridors—and back at Cameron. If he were disappointed he’d never show it. She could do that, too. “So it’s not him. It’s none of the MacSorleys. You’ve pretty much eliminated the Lodge members and won’t hear anything against Fiona. Our suspects have boiled down to Toby, Rick
, and Vanessa. If you don’t mind my using the word ‘our.’”
“Feel free,” Cameron told her.
“I’m only the amateur consultant,” she said, and, with a flourish of her laptop, “I’ll report in after I beard the lion in his den. No pun intended.”
“Right.” His cup to his lips, Cameron walked away, broad shoulders not as stiff as a soldier’s, but set, even so. No thank you, no excuse me. But then, why bother? They’d reached a detente of sorts last night, unanswered questions or not.
The clock struck ten. Setting her own shoulders, Jean opened the library door. “Hello?”
No one was there. A fire leaped in the fireplace. Several lamps and the spotlights over the artifacts sent out cheerful yellow gleams that made the garden beyond the windows look even murkier. Taking the fire and the lights as an indication Rick didn’t intend to stand her up, Jean dumped her computer and bag beside an armchair and headed for the bookshelves.
Oh my. Yes. This was a very fine collection, from modern overviews to historical novels to document boxes labeled with lists of letters and pamphlets to antique tomes emitting the scent of damp attics. She read the authors’ names: Lang, Blaikie, MacBean, Tayler, Seton and Arnot, Chambers—the historians of the Forty-five. But the book that made Jean look twice was the three-volume nineteenth-century edition of Bishop Forbes’ The Lyon in Mourning.
That book had been dismissed as propaganda, even though Forbes compiled his account from eyewitnesses to the atrocities committed after Culloden. . . . The Lyon in Mourning. Was that what had inspired Rick’s last name? Mac-Lyon, son of the lion. The red rampant lion, the ancient heraldic symbol of Scotland.
Several of the “bloodline of the holy grail” books, fantasies clothed as non-fiction, were ranged just beneath the Forbes. Jean had read several of them. In spite of herself, she had to admire the bravado with which their authors careened from straightforward explanations of the origins of the Masons and their Scottish rite to lunatic fringe baloney about the Stuarts being the descendants of Jesus Christ. A vast multi-national and multi-generational conspiracy concealed this “fact” from the public, of course, as the authors proved by crawling to the far ends of perceptual limbs and there clinging to twigs and fallacy alike.
While Jean ducked and covered the moment the word “conspiracy” was breathlessly uttered, still she found “secret history” fantasy entertaining. As many insights came from free association in history as in literature. . . . Suddenly she wondered if the Lodge was into some sort of occult rites. The people bowing over Rick’s hand had resembled a congregation leaving a church. No wonder no one would talk about it. They were embarrassed.
She eyed a miniature of Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir Sylvester Maria Stuart, who even as a bewigged child had a self-satisfied smile. A shield-shaped plaque sat between the miniature and a photo of a small, thin, pale boy wearing a kilt—Rick himself, waiting for the bullies to kick sand in his face and accuse him of wearing a dress. Jean angled the plaque toward the light. The name “MacLyon” was engraved below a coat of arms. So Rick had bought himself a coat of arms. Why wasn’t it emblazoned over the fireplace?
Because, she realized with a frisson of something between incredulity and horror, this wasn’t even as legitimate as a one-size-fits-all coat of arms you could order from an ad in a genealogy magazine. Two of the four quarters of the shield displayed the royal arms of Scotland, the red rampant lion against a gold background surrounded by parallel red lines and fleur de lys. Each of the other two segments showed the leopards of England quartered with the lilies of France. These arms were, more or less, those of the Stuarts.
Yes, heraldry was just one more mutually agreed-upon game, another element in the quest for identity. But still. . . .
Three memories, one verbal, one visual, one musical, slid off the surface of Jean’s brain and splashed into her stomach like rocks falling into a well. Norman Hawley had said something about Yanks poncing about like royalty. The feathers and streamers on Rick and Vanessa’s bed formed the same design as the crest of the Prince of Wales. The words the Lodge had been singing while George Lovelace hung in the game larder had been not “God Save the Queen” but “God Save the King.”
Her knees buckled, dropping her down in a chair. Her stomach gurgled with crackers and that unease she thought of as free-floating anxiety, a sense of the impending enactment of Murphy’s Law.
A sudden roll of drums and squeal of pipes goosed Jean’s heart into her throat and her body back to its feet. Hidden speakers erupted with “Scotland the Brave.” Rick MacLyon, Murphy himself, came stepping down the spiral staircase from his office, dressed to kill in silver-buttoned coat and black tie, kilt and draped plaid, bejeweled brooch and silver-trimmed dirk. She didn’t think Cameron had given Rick back the kilt he’d been wearing Tuesday, but a rich man—a rich obsessed man—could afford more than one, to say nothing of the far from inexpensive decorative addenda.
Only now, as perceptual twigs broke off in her hands, did she recognize the pattern of the MacLyon tartan. Its blue and green blocks crossed with red and gold lines had been copied from a fragment of tartan actually worn by the Bonnie Prince. Oh no, Jean thought, he’s not going to. . . .
Rick paraded in to his soundtrack, his drawn, pale cheeks flushed and his glasses glaring like signal mirrors. He extended his hand. For a moment Jean thought he expected her to kneel and kiss it. Then she saw the folder he held, embossed with the same coat of arms. “Here’s your press kit. Go on, sit down.”
Shutting her mouth with a snap, Jean took the folder and thumped down into the chair.
“We might as well be informal. This is only a preliminary press conference. A dry run.” Rick paced toward the fireplace and struck a noble pose on the hearth.
Jean opened the folder carefully, as though it were a can about to spout paper snakes. Inside were several eight-by-ten color glossies of Rick in full regalia, Rick and Vanessa in full regalia, Glendessary House with Neil in full regalia holding his pipes in the portico. The last one was of Rick posing in front of the glass case in Edinburgh Castle holding the Honors of Scotland—the crown, the scepter, the sword, the Stone of Scone. And whose palm had he greased to be allowed to take that shot?
The other side of the folder held thick, creamy sheets of paper imprinted, again, with the coat of arms. A biography. A family tree. Some sort of register. Copies of letters in eighteenth-century handwriting. Smothering a groan, Jean set the folder aside and hazarded, “The Lord Lyon, the heraldry authority, wouldn’t appreciate you making up your own royal arms. Neither would the Queen, although these days that sort of thing doesn’t get you thrown into the Tower of. . . .”
“Elizabeth Battenberg,” Rick said, “is the latest in a long line of Hanoverian usurpers. Her family tried to cover that up by taking the name Windsor, but we know better.”
Yes, he is going to do it. He wasn’t just out in left field, he’d climbed the fence and was haring off down the freeway. Nothing for it but to hoist her laptop and start typing. To play along. . . . She’d told herself that about Lovelace, and his play had become a tragedy.
“Circumstances have forced my hand,” said Rick. “I’d planned to spend more time laying the groundwork. But there’s a tide in the affairs of man, or whatever the quote is. Fate brought me someone with the right background and the right connections to help get the word out. The time is right. My people must be prepared. This will come as a shock to them.”
No kid. . . . He was talking about Jean. But she’d come here because of George Lovelace.
“It’s time to reveal the true story of the Stuart succession. The Hanoverians usurped the throne in sixteen eighty-eight. They exiled Charles’s grandfather James the Second and the Seventh. They hid the truth about Charles’ children. They manufactured evidence that he died without an heir. They invented a diverted succession, claiming that the Stuart inheritance is now in the hands of some insignificant family in Bavaria. Hah!” He gestured grandly. “My
father was Charles Douglas. My mother was Anne Sobieski. It wasn’t until several years ago I realized the significance of those names. Fate had brought my parents together generations after their family lines diverged. Or was it fate?”
Jean looked up, but with little hope he’d launch into some touching story about his parents meeting at a sock hop or a malt shop. Abandon hope, you are now entering an alternate universe.
“Their meeting was the fruit of a conspiracy,” Rick said.
“You have evidence?” asked Jean, although she knew she was wasting her breath.
“Of course there’s no evidence. That goes to show you how thorough and how devious the conspirators are.”
Yeah, right. Even Cameron, with his two wrongs making a right, wouldn’t buy. . . . Oh, great. Cameron. Jean looked back at her screen, for a moment seeing instead two cool slate-blue eyes.
“The pro-Jacobite movement opposes the Hanoverians. Its members have moved very carefully over the years, in great danger from the present British government with its ‘official’ history.” His forefingers curved into the quotation marks. “Our goal is to re-establish the true lineage of the kings and queens of Scotland.”
“And your parents are members of this movement?”
“Oh no, no. They’re very active in Clan Douglas. I grew up going to Scottish Games and Festivals all over the country. But I’ve only recently told them what the real deal is.”
Leaving them to wonder how they’d managed to infect little Ricky with such a virulent tartan virus. “So you’re in contact with other Jacobites?”
“A few, yes, but each cell must be kept separate from every other one until the day comes. Fortunately one of my followers, a man with the courage of his convictions, stepped forward. Kieran MacSorley, a relative of Cameron of Lochiel. He’s worked long and hard on my behalf.”
The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1) Page 22