Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Did Sharon mean “right” in the sense of “correct”?

  Tim took up the tale. “There’s adequate illumination elsewhere in Williamsburg, but here in the Historic Area they’re trying much too hard to achieve authenticity. By doing so they’ve left the place impossible to navigate. The place where Francis Street dips into a ravine, we would not have seen the car stopped in the middle of the road if it had not been white and had its brake lights on. Very dangerous situation.”

  “Boys from the college cruising for girls,” Sharon said. “They’d stopped to talk to a couple of them. We have two sons, we know how boys are, always chasing skirts.”

  Jean did not look at Alasdair, even when she heard the tiny rumble in his throat. So that had been the Dingwalls who’d passed them and the Campbell-Reids, appropriately enough driving like bats out of hell. No wonder they’d misinterpreted Alasdair’s kilt.

  Now Tim glanced from the portrait to Alasdair and back. “You’re aware, I’m sure, that kilts and tartans and all of that paraphernalia began with Sir Walter Scott around 1820 as part of the development of the Scottish tourist industry.”

  As one, Jean and Alasdair turned toward the explanatory plaque below the Dunmore portrait. “That was painted in 1765,” said Jean.

  Sharon’s pale eyes, already so large as to be bulbous, grew even larger. “You can’t believe everything you hear. Or see.”

  “You’re saying this portrait is, ah, misattributed. Or a forgery,” said Alasdair.

  “You never know who you can trust,” Tim told him with a gentle smile. “Let me suggest that you consider the Witch Box.”

  This time it was Miranda who rumbled faintly, the purr of a cat scenting prey. As she always said, quoting someone accurately played out sufficient rope for them to hang themselves. And watching people hang themselves made for revenue-garnering entertainment. Which is where I come in, Jean told herself.

  And she recognized where Alasdair came in, his mouth twisted like hempen rope. Yes, it was time to consider the Witch Box.

  A knot of guests drifted away from the railed platform in the center of the room, revealing the object of interest. The object of such desire to someone in Perthshire that he or she had stolen a replica of it.

  The cracked and dried oak panels of the double-shoebox-sized chest were darkened with age, but its carvings had been done in relief, so that the raised tendrils and leaves and the initials “F”, “S”, and “B” had been repeatedly wiped clean of grime and were a dull, deep reddish-brown. Iron hinges and an iron clasp showed little rust, but were still grainy as soot. On its circular dais behind the railing, the small Box seemed to hunker down like a toad.

  The explanatory plaque was printed in two paragraphs, the first about how the chest probably dated to the sixteenth century and allegedly had belonged to Charlotte Murray’s Stewart relatives. Charlotte brought it with her to Virginia in 1774 and took it when she fled back to Britain in 1775. There it came down through one of her children to a present-day John Murray, the Duke of Atholl, who owned Blair Castle.

  Jean noted the qualifiers greasing the first two sentences. So far so good. It was in the second paragraph of the plaque that the modifiers thickened into lard. “The vegetal motifs of the Box are likely no more than decoration and probably have no occult meaning at all, let alone any linked to the supposed Green Man legends. Despite the initials carved on the Box, it is not known whether it ever belonged to Francis Stewart, Lord Bothwell, the supposed witch and nemesis of his cousin, James I of England and VI of Scotland, only that a similar Box, complete with what appears to be a stone inset, appears in the woodcuts accompanying ‘Newes from Scotland,’ an account of the Berwick witch trials published in England in 1592.”

  Even though “Newes” was part propaganda, part pornography, it had helped inspire Shakespeare to write “The Scottish Play,” Macbeth, and was as valid a source for the provenance of the Witch Box and the charm stone as any.

  Although, since it was standard practice to ignore that which you couldn’t explain, whoever wrote the plaque hadn’t pursued the story of the charm stone, the mythical object that had reputedly occupied the smooth spot in the center of the Box where the carved tendrils parted. The three-sided smooth spot was, at least, undeniably there.

  “It’s Charlotte Murray’s marriage chest,” Sharon stated.

  “A mite small for a marriage chest,” said Miranda. “Some here in the Museum are almost large enough to be coffins.”

  “She was a wealthy woman from a respected and influential family,” Tim said. “She had a large collection of boxes, chests, and coffers to hold her linens and other household items. The fact that she carried this one around with her and used it for her special things, like a treasure chest, proves it was important to her.”

  “Or that it was a convenient size,” Jean suggested. “How do you know for sure she had it with her at all, let along used it for anything more than odds and ends?”

  “There’s an inventory in the Rockefeller Library,” said Sharon, and pointed at the plaque. “See, it says right there, Charlotte brought the Box to Virginia.”

  Alasdair inhaled. Jean predicted his next words: That proves nothing.

  But Miranda spoke first, more interested in dangling bait than in debating. “I’m seeing where a marriage chest or the like would be decorated with leaves and plants and all, as fertility symbols. But what about the wee faces?”

  Even in the Museum’s carefully calibrated spotlight, the small, rudimentary human visages—like leering happy-faces—hidden among the leaves weren’t easy to make out. Sharon had probably broken the laser beam trying to see them better. Now she said, “As if the initials aren’t enough, the faces, pagan green men, prove that the Box belonged to Charlotte’s ancestor Francis, the witch.”

  Prove? Jean went after something a little closer to provable. “He was her distant collateral ancestor, maybe. Lots of people have ‘F’, ‘S’, and ‘B’ in their names. And the initials are in different corners of the chest, not in any particular order.”

  Sharon bobbed up and down, causing Alasdair to avert his eyes from her all-too-fleshy chest. “Very observant, Jean! Yes, that ‘B’ could stand for ‘Bacon’, couldn’t it?”

  “The seventeenth-century scientist,” Miranda established with a smile so bright it revealed each well-tended tooth.

  Better and better. They’d just crossed the “what if?” boundary into Francis Bacon mythology. Among other feats, the seventeenth-century scientist had supposedly written Shakespeare’s plays. What she’d be writing was an entire series. Jean rubbed her brain cells together in glee.

  “I’m hearing that the Museum sent their best craftsmen to Blair Castle to study the Box,” said Alasdair, offering his own juicy worm, “so’s they could make an exact copy for display there whilst the original’s here.”

  “Exact is as exact does,” Tim said inscrutably and unhelpfully, and plunged on. “Charlotte Murray, nee Stewart, used her contacts to get her husband appointed governor of Virginia.”

  “Yes, she did,” said Jean.

  “She obviously wanted, nay, needed, to get to Virginia and recover the Clach Giseag, the Am Fear Uaine, her family’s missing charm stone. That’s clearly why she brought the Box with her.”

  Miranda acknowledged that statement. “The stone was here, was it?”

  “Clearly?” Alasdair picked an easier target than Tim’s Gaelic pronunciation. “Obviously?”

  Jean tried mental telepathy, thinking in his direction: Miranda and I are playing good cop, bad cop. They’re not going to spill the beans about the theft. They’re not going to tell you whether there are any beans to spill. Work with us here.

  Sharon said, “Charlotte was the only governor’s wife to make the trip—and it was a difficult trip then.”

  “Difficult enough to make six or so hours in economy class look like a piece of cake,” Jean said.

  Tim and Sharon stared at her.

  Okay. Jean went on, “
All of the eighteenth-century governors except two sent lieutenants to do the job, they didn’t come themselves. Most of the lieutenant-governors brought their wives. The only other governor besides Dunmore to come himself was a bachelor.”

  “Q.E.D.,” said Tim, his gentle smile annotated by a roll of his eyes. “Proof that Charlotte had a good reason to travel to the colonies. It was essential for her to recover the stone.”

  “And did she recover it?” asked Miranda, not just hanging on every word, but making sure Tim saw her hanging on every word.

  “Charlotte and her husband were forced to leave the area quickly when the Revolution heated up,” Sharon said. “Or did someone intend for them to leave quickly, before she retrieved the stone? Hmmm?”

  “The stone being good for what? Why was it essential?” Alasdair stood with his hands folded behind his back, but his pose was hardly casual. He was playing neither good nor bad cop, but straight cop, always after just the facts, ma’am.

  “It was—it is—green, like the green men carved on the Box. A green stone in a triangular silver mounting.” Tim looked around to see several other guests pressing in closely, taking him to be an interpreter like Thomas Jefferson on the staircase, dispenser of historical wisdom.

  With a wise smile, his forefinger tapping the side of his nose meaningfully, Tim lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Tomorrow, Jean. We’ll let you in on some secrets tomorrow.”

  Chapter Four

  Funny how the air in the room had grown so thin. Sagging, Jean took a deep breath that caught a whiff of mothballs. All shall be revealed. Right. And they probably had a bridge for sale in Brooklyn, too. “Eleven a.m. tomorrow, right? Would you like to meet at one of the colonial taverns? Lunch is on Great Scot.”

  “No,” said Sharon. “We’ll meet you at the Cheese Shop in Merchant’s Square.”

  “Good idea. It’s right next to the theater where Hugh Munro and his band are performing. Have you heard them? Great Scottish folk-rock.”

  “The Cheese Shop has a patio,” Tim said. “We will be able to keep an eye on our surroundings there, and take precautions against eavesdroppers.”

  “It’s a date,” Jean replied, fully aware her smile had become as stiff as Alasdair’s back, but for a different reason. She was suppressing laughter. He was suppressing irritation.

  Even Miranda’s smile was starting to glaze over. “I’m sure you’ll get on famously, Jean, Sharon, Tim. Me, I’ll be attending an antiques seminar.”

  “Tomorrow’s Halloween. Woo-woo for sale to the gullible.” Tim’s dark gray eyes turned toward the Witch Box and then back to his audience.

  “Bread and circuses.” Sharon curtsied, skirts lifted and spread so far she exposed bony ankles thrust into low socks and backless shoes. “If you’ll excuse us, our son Dylan’s wandering around the Museum, probably falling over his shoe buckles.”

  “These rental clothes,” added Tim with a low bow, “are cheaply made, and are cut clumsily so as to fit the greatest number of visitors. When our work is complete, so many more visitors will visit Williamsburg that they will then be able to afford better quality clothing.”

  Side by side, alike in dignity if not in size, the Dingwalls walked toward the door of the gallery—where they were joined by the same young man with whom Rachel had been making use of a private corner. Like his parents, then, Dylan wasn’t an interpreter at all.

  Jean had seen families dressed in colonial costume, the little boys in cocked hats, the little girls in long frocks. If she’d been a little girl she’d have asked for knee breeches, on the theory that boys, who were not expected to sit in the corner and sew, had more fun. Which brought her into Jessica Finch—er, Evesdottir’s—territory, where the trenches of gender politics made your average World War I battlefield look like a field of daisies.

  She caught Alasdair’s thoroughly jaundiced eye. “In fair Williamsburg we lay our scene, to paraphrase Romeo and Juliet.”

  “That’s why Dylan is unsuitable, then,” he returned.

  “Eh?” asked Miranda.

  “We saw Dylan Dingwall there with Rachel Finch, Jessica Evesdottir’s daughter . . .” Jean stuttered, made a face, moved on. “She’s the woman who Sharon Dingwall is suing for calling her a witch or something like that.”

  “The truth of the matter has likely been distorted by the time it came down to us,” Alasdair concluded.

  “A wee bit scandal, is it?” Miranda asked. “Conflict? Drama? Though no bodies scattered about the stage in the last act, I’m hoping.”

  “So are we,” said Jean, just as Alasdair said, “Oh aye.”

  Miranda looked over at the family group, Tim speaking slowly, in words of one syllable, perhaps, to Dylan’s attentive face, and Sharon standing on tiptoes between them. “A handsome enough lad, though his eyes are right close together. He’s a clever one, I’m thinking, but then, his parents are as well. Just our sort, Jean, nutters with verbal ability.”

  Alasdair’s quiet snort signified agreement.

  Tim gestured back toward the exhibit. Dylan’s eyes turned toward Alasdair and Jean and widened in dismay, so far that they protruded like his mother’s. He was no doubt registering that, yes, the couple standing with Miranda could make something of his own coupling with Rachel. And then, as Tim’s moving finger included the Witch Box, Dylan’s face broke into an unrepentant, even charming, grin.

  “Aye, lad,” said Alasdair under his breath, “here’s the ladies wanting something from your folk. Your secret’s safe for the moment.” He turned to face a display case, his hands interlocked behind his back in a policeman’s studiedly neutral stance.

  Jean watched the three Dingwalls less walk than march around the atrium, like generals on a tour of inspection. On the far balcony they nailed a solitary Matt Finch with two glares and another grin. With a tightly coiled shrug—move along, nothing to see here—Matt veered off in another direction.

  “I’ll be off, then. I’m booked to have dinner at the Trellis with Rodney Lockhart,” Miranda told Jean, although her gaze targeted Alasdair’s disdainful back. “Good luck to you with the Dingwalls. And with Alasdair.”

  Miranda, as always, was too perceptive by half. “Thanks,” Jean told her, and then, a nerve cell firing in one of her brain’s back alleys, “Oh! Speaking of bodies, do you know who Wesley Hagedorn is? Was? Lockhart said he passed away this afternoon in a tragic accident. I doubt he meant tragic in the Greek drama sense, involving hubris and all, but then, that’s why I’m asking.”

  “Oh aye, there’s a real turn-up,” Miranda said on a long, considering breath. “He’s by way of being—he was—a cabinetmaker and interpreter.”

  “Anything suspicious about his death?”

  “Playing the detective once more, Jean?” Again Miranda glanced at Alasdair. Even she had to notice that his ears were twitching backwards like a cat’s, listening. “I’m inferring from what the staff’s saying amongst themselves—always listen to the staff, eh? They know all, see all, even things they’re not meant to know and see.”

  Jean nodded. “Isn’t that the truth?”

  “Another cabinetmaker chap went to collect him for the reception and found him dead in a small pond next his flat.”

  His flat was probably to southeast of the Historic Area, beneath the beam of a searchlight. “Any unattended death is considered suspicious,” Jean said, as much for herself as Alasdair, “although it might be perfectly natural.”

  “The police are setting up a full crime scene investigation, I’m hearing. Though I’m hardly needing to know, am I?” Miranda didn’t have to add, And neither are the pair of you. Especially since she knew that all three of them wanted to know the details, to heck with the gulf between needing and wanting. “We’ll have a wee blether tomorrow, Jean, after you’ve braved your interview. Cheers, Alasdair.”

  “Cheers, Miranda,” he said over his shoulder.

  Exhaling through pursed lips, Jean told herself that Wesley Hagedorn’s death the
day of the opening was no more than an unfortunate coincidence. Judging by the angle of Alasdair’s head, he was trying to convince himself of the same thing.

  As for the details she did need to know, so far Tim and Sharon hadn’t told her anything she didn’t know already, about their half-baked, soft-boiled view of history, at least. They weren’t alone in having a less-than-firm grasp of reality. Manipulating history was a money-making enterprise these days, as Jean—and Alasdair—knew to their cost.

  They’d dealt with criminals exploiting the romance of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the pseudo-science of the Loch Ness monster, and the claims made by a bestselling novel about Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel. And now they’d crossed the Atlantic to find the same manipulative impulse here. It was human nature. Or so Jean readily admitted.

  Alasdair, though—well, she’d sensitized herself to him well enough to detect his slow simmer of annoyance, even though he appeared merely to be gazing at two almost identical miniatures of Lord Dunmore in later life. So late, Jean thought as she turned her attention to the labels, he was mere days away from his death in 1809. What a contrast this slumped, balding old man made with the paragon of vigor swathed in tartan! Although the old Dunmore was also swathed in tartan, a feathered Highland bonnet sitting beside him. Here he didn’t gaze into the distance, into a bright future. Here he gazed directly out at the viewer, both bewildered and resentful, as if asking, How has it come to this? But even with death knocking on his door, Dunmore showed no despair.

  Another miniature, this one in watercolor, showed a woman’s face in profile, a woman identified by the label as Charlotte Murray, Lady Dunmore. Her patrician features—a long nose, a small chin, and between them a stiff upper lip—supported the elaborate rolls and piles of a powdered wig. The weight of the wig brought her chin up and head back, giving her an air as proud and privileged as her husband’s, but also exposing a length of white throat.

  The frame of her miniature was decorated like his, with a crown, as befit peers of the realm. “Do you think it was a love match?” Jean asked.