Ashes to Ashes (5 page)

Michael led Rebecca to the door through which Darnley had fled. “The larder,” he announced. Below a sloping ceiling a window the size of a tea-tray was set deep in the wall. A broom and a mop stood next to bowls of water and cat food. One wooden shelf was scattered with cans and boxes; the others were filled with dim plastic draped shapes. Rebecca peeked. It was Royal Doulton china, untouched for years, like relics of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Past the vinyl floor of the kitchen and the stone flags of the entry, between the main staircase and the front door, was another door. “Lumber room,” Michael said. “Formerly the butler’s pantry and wine cellar, back when John Forbes gave house parties for the posh set.”

“Vanderbilt, Frick, Mellon. But never Carnegie— Forbes loathed him.”

“If it wasn’t for my Carnegie scholarship at Edinburgh, I’d no be here.”

Nice historical irony. Nodding approval, Rebecca squinted through the gloom in the low, dungeonlike room. It was stacked with crates and chests, loot never even opened, perhaps, after one of John’s obsessive buying sprees in the old country.

John Forbes’s parents had emigrated from Sutherland with his infant self some years before Andrew Carnegie had left Dunfermline. Carnegie had shared the fortune he made in steel; no wonder he was lionized back in Scotland. The fortune Forbes had made in railroads, oil, and various sharp practices on Wall Street he’d never shared, and it had bought him only contempt. Rebecca didn’t feel particularly sorry for him. Wealth can buy happiness, she told herself, if you use it the right way.

When Carnegie had built a home in Scotland, Forbes had built Dun Iain here, truculently copying Craigievar, the seat of Forbeses who disdained all relationship with a brash American who simply happened to have the same name.

“Forbes had a muckle great ego,” Michael continued, with a sly sideways glance, “to name the place after himself.”

He was testing her. “Dun Iain means ‘John’s Fort’ in Gaelic,” Rebecca responded sweetly.

But Michael had already taken a few steps along the narrow passageway that ran between the boxes. He ran his hand over a dusty and cobwebby trunk and then rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. The mark he left on the trunk was almost as clean as the smudges around the unlocked catch.

Someone had opened the trunk very recently. And the dust on the lid of the box next to it was also smudged with several fingerprints. “You didn’t waste any time opening these up,” Rebecca remarked.

Michael shied like a skittish horse. “I hivna been in here. I hivna had the inventory, have I? I’ve been muckin’ aboot wi’ old receipts and lists.”

“Oh. Then I bet it was Mrs. Garst and the caretaker and gardener— the Pruitts— looking for the treasure.”

“Treasure?” His smile glittered. “Have you been heedin’ the old woman’s gossip?”

“Have you?” Rebecca retorted.

Shrugging, he led the way upstairs to the Hall. The lantern-shaped chandelier dangled from a plaster thistle like a spun-sugar stalactite. Dining and easy chairs were upholstered in green Forbes tartan. Beneath its ornate plaster coat of arms the fireplace gleamed with oddments of brass. Antlers hung on the walls among antique swords and muskets. On one sideboard was a chess set, its pieces ivory Celts and Norsemen. A short-necked guitar, its inlaid wood carefully polished, and a small harp were enshrined on another.

“David Rizzio’s guitar,” said Michael, “that he was playin’ the night he was murdered. Or so says a receipt. I hivna established provenance yet, mind you. The inventory will help, when Adler troubles himself to bring it.”

“And Mary’s harp, I suppose?” Rebecca touched the guitar. The wood was strangely warm and the strings vibrated gently beneath her fingertips. Her thought reverberated in response. She saw the small supper room at Holyrood Palace violated by Lord Darnley’s bravos— Mary and her ladies staggering back, aghast, and poor harmless Rizzio dragged out screaming, until the flash of daggers cut his screams short… .

Rebecca snatched her hand back from the guitar. She could have sworn the strings of the harp sounded a small, querulous note in some harmonic of memory. “Stupid Mary?” she asked, more breathlessly than she would have liked. It was early in the day to get carried away by the fascinating associations of the artifacts. “Last night you called Mary romantic and stupid.”

Michael was staring at the harp. He blinked. “What?”

“Stupid Mary, you said. Surely you were just pulling my leg.”

The dark, level line of his brows crumpled, appalled at the very idea. “Takin’ the mickey out of you? No at all. Mary’s heart ruled her head. She let herself be used by the men around her, like the mewlin’ and greetin’ heroine of some tatty novel.”

“I imagine she did quite a bit of crying. Given the time in which she lived, she had little choice but to ally herself with men.”

“Didn’t she, then? What of her cousin Elizabeth, who ruled England with the heart and stomach of a man, as she said herself? Now there was a woman.”

“Well yes,” murmured Rebecca, “there’s no higher compliment you can give a woman, is there, than that she acts like a man?”

Michael’s hair was starting to lose its sleekness. He scooped it off his forehead with the impatient gesture she’d already noted as characteristic. He fixed Rebecca with an aggravated frown. This time it was she who turned away, shaking her head. It wasn’t worth arguing over.

The sun really had come out, brightening the Hall and the landing. A quick glance into the study showed Rebecca the suit of armor that had frightened her the night before gleaming guilelessly in the corner amid the jumble of furniture. A large framed document proved to be a copy of the thirteenth century Declaration of Arbroath. A small door in the paneling led to a tiny chamber with a rolltop desk and several metal filing cabinets.

“At Craigievar this was ‘Danzig Willie’ Forbes’s private study,” said Michael. “There it’s called the prophet’s chamber.”

“Because Willie was a prophet of commerce?” Rebecca asked.

Michael chuckled humorlessly. “I would imagine ‘profit’— with an ‘f’— is closer to the proper meaning.”

“You’ve seen Craigievar?”

“Aye. For a copy, this one’s no bad.” He bounded lightly onto the bottom step of the spiral staircase and padded upward. For someone who moved so catlike during the day, he was certainly heavy-footed at night. Rebecca followed, telling herself she could afford the extra toast; these stairs were as good as her aerobics classes.

Michael diverted into his bedroom and returned slapping his denim-clad thigh with his spiral notebook. The whine of the vacuum cleaner filtered faintly down the staircase. “Pay attention. Here’s where we start separatin’ the coal from the dross.”

Yes, your grace, Rebecca thought again, as he led the way into the large bedroom down the hall from his small one.

Now, her second time through, she was able to focus on individual items. “Flemish tapestries,” said Michael with a flourish of his notebook. “Excellent condition. Portraits by Raeburn and Lawrence. A Rembrandt cartoon. A Meissen clock.”

Rebecca went from object to object, crooning appreciation. This was wonderful, everything she’d anticipated and more. “Graham of Claverhouse,” she said, identifying one portrait.

“Died of old age in London in 1707,” Michael returned.

She shot him a scornful look. “He was killed in the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, as you well know.”

“Mm,” said Michael, aggressively noncommittal. “Who’s that?”

Rebecca eyed an illuminated manuscript page. “Saint Margaret, I think. She of the chapel in Edinburgh Castle. Right?”

“Right enough.”

The other small bedroom on that floor had evidently belonged to James. An aluminum walker and other bits and pieces of sickroom equipment lay jumbled beside a Sheraton wardrobe. Heck of a place to be stuck when you’re old and sick, Rebecca thought, up three flights of stairs. The man must have loved Dun Iain to have resisted moving to the nursing home Dorothy had mentioned.

Rebecca reached for the doors of the wardrobe. “Careful,” said Michael brightly. “If you go about keekin’ into cupboards, you’re askin’ for things to fall oot on your head.”

She opened the door. Nothing fell on her but the stale scent of lavender, underlain by a slight acrid reek. The wardrobe was crammed with long dresses with puffed sleeves, hatboxes, prim high-button boots, and lacy garments shrouded in yellowed tissue paper. “Elspeth’s things, still here?”

“They’re from the right time,” replied Michael. “She died in 1901.”

Rebecca gave the cradle a quick rock as they went on to the next room. By its door was a pen and ink drawing. “Dunstaffnage Castle,” she said. “Built by the MacDougals and appropriated by the Campbells.”

“Where Mary Hamilton was imprisoned in 1571.”

“Where Flora MacDonald was imprisoned in 1746. Will you stop that?”

“Stop what?” Michael eyed the drawing. “Poor daft Flora. If she’d handed Bonnie Prince Charlie over to the authorities, we’d have been spared a lot of romantic twaddle.”

“Spoken like a true Campbell,” she teased.

“So the Campbells had the gumption to see which way the wind was blowin’, and sided wi’ the Hanoverians.”

“And were richly rewarded for doing so.”

“It always comes to money in the end,” he stated, with the finality of a period at the end of a sentence.

She wasn’t about to dispute that. She waved airily at yet another portrait. “There’s Prince Charles Edward himself. Take it up with him.” And she walked on, leaving Michael to make a sardonic bow before the handsome if arrogant features of the Young Pretender.

Rebecca felt as if she were inside a kaleidoscope, bits of Scottish history from Robert Bruce to Robert Burns, from Saint Columba to Harry Lauder, shifting and sliding before her eyes. From the sublime… . A Covenanter’s Bible. A chain mail gauntlet. A broken bit of statuary from Scone. Sir Walter Scott’s inkwell. Scrapbooks filled with old postcards, neatly labeled in what Rebecca had already come to recognize as James’s copperplate hand.

To the ridiculous. Jelly jars lined the windowsills, filled with scraggly bits of ivy. Candy wrappers were neatly spindled on old nails. Stacks of lurid detective novels teetered atop cabinets.

On the wall of the fifth floor corridor was a portrait of John Forbes himself. The old tycoon’s eyes were expressionless onyx marbles, his mouth a thin, suspicious fissure above an outthrust chin. Lush white sideburns and moustache could not soften a face dehydrated by a lifetime of resentment. On a little table below the portrait was a leather-bound copy of
Man of Iron
, by James Ramsey Forbes, its gilded embellishments cracked and tarnished. “Did James mean the title to be ironic?” Rebecca wondered aloud. “Iron rusts. Carnegie was the man of steel.”

“Hard to say,” said Michael. “How’d you like to be the only bairn of such a man?”

“Better than being his wife,” Rebecca said emphatically. On the dresser in the big bedroom was a set of ivory-handled hairbrushes. They were flanked by several cut-glass bottles labeled with the names of expensive Paris perfumeries. “Also Elspeth’s? John and then James kept her things out, as if expecting her to return any moment?”

“They were more than a wee bit mad, the both of them.” Michael fluffed up a pillow on the sumptuously draped and canopied bed, removing the imprint of a resting head, then turned and regarded the full-length portrait of Mary Stuart. Rebecca, too, was drawn yet again by the tragic queen’s serene expression. The crucifix she held gestured as calmly toward an inset scene of her execution as though she were a conductor sounding the downbeat of a symphony, “Scots Wha Hae” played in counterpoint to “Rule Britannia”.

“I wonder,” Michael mused, “whether yon face peerin’ into his bed put old John on or off the job.” He turned aside, disallowing his smirk.

That, Rebecca suspected, had been a salacious double entendre. She shouldn’t acknowledge it. She smothered a smile at both John Forbes’s necrophiliac tendencies and Michael’s undisciplined mouth.

Footsteps clicked across the floor above. Michael’s face tilted abruptly upward. He stood very still, very quiet, staring so intently at the plaster ceiling she thought for a moment he could see through it.

Before she could catch herself she spun about and looked toward the stairwell. Nothing appeared but Dorothy and her vacuum cleaner, heralded by thumps and crashes. Of course, Rebecca told herself. What did you expect?

“There you are!” the woman cried cheerily. “Found the treasure yet?”

Michael emitted a long exhalation.

“There’re some fascinating things here,” returned Rebecca. And yet they were lonely things, objects in exile stripped to the barest emotional resonance. Like the guitar and the harp, they exchanged quick notes of terrible reminiscence… . Getting fanciful in your old age, she told herself. No wonder you got carried away with that guitar. Next you’ll start believing in the Forbes treasure. The Erskine letter would be treasure enough.

“Checking out the bedrooms, I see.” Dorothy rolled her engine of cleanliness into the room, plugged it in, and laid down her basket. She fixed Michael with a stare over the top of her glasses. “So the two of you will be spending a lot of time alone here together, hm?”

Michael glanced first at Mary’s painted features and then at Rebecca, just as Rebecca, to her horror, felt her cheeks grow hot in a blush.

“I know how young people behave these days,” Dorothy continued with a ghastly simpering grin. “Everything’s so casual. Sleep around, have a good time, and never mind the consequences. Well, repent at leisure, I always say.”

Time for a dignified exit. As one, Michael and Rebecca started for the hall, collided in the doorway, and lurched away from each other like magnets touching negative poles. They didn’t stop until they’d gained the airy, whitewashed expanse of the ballroom. Blocks of sunlight danced a slow and stately minuet across the floor and a suggestion of rot hung on the air.

Michael seemed undecided whether to laugh or to swear. He said at last in a rather choked voice, “So then, what do you think?”