Heather Song (37 page)

T
hen came the strangest occurrence since Olivia’s arrival had begun to upset the peaceful equilibrium of life at Castle Buchan.

With the rising of the sun one day again came another terrific wind from the east. The crows and gulls flew overhead, squawking and shrieking in the tempest as if heralding the end of the world. Their frenzied tumult seemed to bring upon the castle a visitation of apprehension. Everyone was unaccountably on edge, nervous, jittery, as if a spiritual plague had blown in with the wind. I longed for Iain’s calming and strengthening presence. But he and I had had supper together the evening before and he was to work late on this day. I did not expect to see him for several days.

Sarah came to me frantically in the early afternoon.

“I canna find her, mum,” she said. The look on her face was one of terror that she was about to lose her job.

“Who, Sarah?”

“My mistress, mum…Mrs. Urquhart. She’s gone missing.”

“She must be around somewhere.”

“I’ve searched high and low, mum. ’Tis two hours now. I’m worried she might have fallen, mum, and it’ll be my fault.”

“Don’t worry, Sarah,” I said, following her from my studio where I was getting ready for my afternoon’s series of lessons. “I am sure we shall find her. Whatever happens, no one will blame you. My sister-in-law is lucky to have someone as devoted as you. I am very thankful, too.”

“’Tis kind of you to say, mum.”

Sarah and I went to Olivia’s rooms and conducted a quick search. Sarah was right. Olivia was not there.

We set everyone in the castle looking, but no one turned up a trace. At three I returned to my studio for my four students, leaving Nicholls and Farquharson to continue the search. By then the ladies were getting squeamish about what they might stumble onto if they did happen to find Olivia.

I finished lessons about five-thirty. By then the darkness of mid-October was setting in. Still Olivia had not turned up. If she was taking walks and getting lost, as now appeared the case, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s began to loom as a real possibility. I notified the police in Buckie. They came, briefly interrogated Sarah, then drove all the castle entryways several times, looking into the surrounding woods and shrubbery as best they were able in the darkness.

By the time we retired for the night, worse than a harmless walk was on everyone’s mind. We all feared that Olivia was in genuine danger and, wherever she had got to, that she might not live through the night. Nicholls speculated that she might have wandered to the village or the sea. She was clearly not strong enough to walk the rocky coastline or keep her balance on the cliffs in the darkness.

The possibility also existed that she was still in the castle, but had fallen and was unable to move. We would just have to wait to see what the morning brought.

In the middle of the night I had the strangest yet most wonderful dream. I dreamed of harp music playing through all the chimneys of the castle. I dreamed I was on the roof somewhere and that all the chimneys were filled with the harmonies of all my students, and more besides, playing on all my favorite harps. The chimneys blew soft windy mysterious harp-melodies coming from deep below. Singing to the music was the softest most lovely voice, though I could make out no words of the mysterious song. It sounded like Gaelic…soft, soothing, mesmerizing, weaving upon me a spell of enchantment as if coming down from the very Highlands on the wind, somehow being drawn into the chimneys of the castle, where it mingled with the music of the harps of my studio.

Just as I began to come awake, even as the dream and the music and the mesmerizing voice began to fade, suddenly I recognized the tune and I knew the familiar words of the ballad I taught all my students. But I was able to catch only the faint ending dream-​fragment:
“Over the sea from Skye…over the sea from Skye…over the sea…over the sea…from Skye.”

And then it was gone. I awoke and all was still. I didn’t know whether I’d dreamed the sound or actually heard something.

When again I slept, it was peacefully and soundly, until the light of morning shone in through a high window facing south. I dressed and hurried down to the kitchen where I could depend on Farquharson to have water on for his own strong coffee and for those who followed to prepare their own beverage of choice. It was a few minutes after seven. Cora and Sarah were sitting with him waiting for a pot of tea to steep.

“Any sign of Olivia?” I asked.

“No, mum,” replied Sarah. “I hardly slept for worrying about her.”

“You are certain she did not return to her room?”

“We jist came fae there, Marie,” said Cora, “baith o’ us. Nae a hint—the bed’s no’ been slept in.”

I glanced toward Farquharson.

“Harvey an’ I’s been oot since daybreak,” he said. “We been all ower the groun’s, ’neath the brig, the gardens, the path doon alang the burnie.”

“And nothing?”

“No’ a footprint tae be seen.”

The day advanced. The police came again. The search was expanded to both villages. By midday everyone in town knew that Olivia was missing.

A
cloud hung over Buchan Castle all day, and deepened as the morning of the fruitless search advanced.

Dozens of men and women from both villages joined in the search, which by silent accord began to focus on the rocky and jagged coastlines between Findlater and Crannoch. The sound of the police helicopter whirring back and forth along the shoreline, hovering here and there for a closer look, was a constant reminder to this coastal community that, more often than not when someone went missing, it was the sea making one more claim, serving notice again that these waters were not to be tamed.

Not a few of the older men and women among the searchers found themselves reliving the disappearance of Winny Bain thirty-five years earlier, and noting the eerily similar circumstances. Among those who had helped conduct that search it was well known that Olivia was the last person to see her alive. Now, some said, she seemed destined to the same fate. Though few had voiced such thoughts during her life, more stories gradually began to circulate from garden to garden, clothesline to clothesline, over fence and across street, from one to another to another until all Port Scarnose and Crannoch were abuzz. By midafternoon the entire coastline was covered with men and women scouring the paths and rocks and promontories and coves for some clue that might point to the duke’s missing sister.

The activity stemmed not so much from the great love in which Olivia was held so much as that now at last it was out in the open how strange had been everything connected with the brother and the sister, their father and grandfather and his strange witch-wife from Skye. Everyone was suddenly talking about the queer happenings, the second sight, Olivia’s curses and hexes, even poor little Gwendolyn’s peculiarities. All the superstition held in check for decades by Olivia’s presence was now loosed on the gossip-winds of hundreds of prattling tongues. The most valuable currency of the day came to be the possession of some yet spookier or more bizarre tale that one might parcel out piecemeal to ears hot with curiosity. The search was thus driven not by love but by the fearful thrill of the dark unknown, everyone lusting to be the first to proclaim to the community, becoming an instant celebrity by the discovery—
“Here, over here…I’ve found her body!”

The boys of the villages, the instant school let out and informed that the search continued with nothing yet found, dashed for the shore, no thoughts on this day of donning wet suits and swimming off the harbor pier. It was the lure of a dead body to be found, and possibly one with unknown connections to the dark forces of the underworld, that drew them, and that would keep them scouring the coastline till dark.

All the while, the older women who kept counsel together agreed that the body of Olivia Urquhart would never be found. Fate ordained it. She was with Winny now, they said. They had suspected more to the story of Winny’s disappearance than was commonly known, though none had breathed a word of their suspicions to a living soul. But they had known. And now fate, or the gods of the deep, or the call of an ancestor’s past, had decreed that Olivia, like Winny before her, would join the legions of the dead without a trace. The men and the nickums were wasting their time, they said. The tide had claimed her by now, every trace of blood washed away by the salty sea. Her body was floating miles away, and would eventually sink to rest in the middle of the Firth, if the sharks allowed it, to rot off its bones and lie with Winny’s awaiting the last trump when they would rise together out of the sea and into the clouds.

Such was the justice of fate, they said, that Olivia should go missing in exactly the same way, and never be heard from again.

Could it be suicide? asked a few. Others merely nodded with significant looks that hinted at inside knowledge but betrayed nothing, and clicked their tongues.

If they wanted to know where Olivia’s final minutes had been spent, they said, though they would find no trace of her, the searchers would do well to concentrate their efforts between Logie Head and Findlater. It was there that Winny had last been seen. The same stretch of lonely headlands and cliffs had always exercised a lurid fascination upon Olivia Urquhart since her earliest girlhood.

The auld wives were right. Not a trace of Olivia turned up, either at the base of Findlater or anywhere else. Eventually even the most enterprising of the searchers were compelled to admit the case hopeless until another day of light came. By then two more tides, one predicted extremely high, would sweep the coast clean twice more of what evidence might possibly remain.

The police gave up their search as evening fell. A pall of gloom settled over Port Scarnose and Crannoch like a descending black cloud of death. Not a few went to their beds that night more attentive to locked doors than was their custom, and lay listening for strange sounds outside, and thinking of ghosts. As Castle Buchan retired for the night, it was with a sense of sad inevitability, perhaps a few regrets, sober reflections, along with the sense that, whatever Olivia had been to us all in life, we would now have to come to terms with what she would be to us in death.

Most of the women of the castle household, however, were, if anything, even more agitated. Those who came in by day were glad enough to return to their own homes. I noticed that both Farquharson and Nicholls fortified themselves a little more heavily than usual through the evening with doses from the traditional medicine cabinet of Scots through the ages—the amber brew called
aqua vitae.
Sarah refused to sleep alone and pulled a rollaway into Cora’s room for the night. However imaginary the green lady may or may not have been, Sarah’s fear of Olivia’s ghost was real enough. She had no doubt that if her mistress had indeed passed out of this world, Castle Buchan was the first stop she would make on her way to the next.

As I laid my head on the pillow, I must confess almost to a sense of relief that it was finally over, that Olivia and Alasdair would finally somehow be reconciled on the other side.

My last thoughts before drifting off to sleep were wondering what kind of service we should plan for Olivia, and how long the authorities would wait, without a body, before declaring her officially dead so that we could proceed with a memorial.

A
gain came the dream of the harp music from the chimneys, with the same peaceful effects. I cannot imagine any more-soothing music to sleep to than that of the harp. I lay dreamily, soaking it in, almost as if listening to myself, or to Gwendolyn, or to the angels. Who can tell in a dream? All your sensations mingle together in a weird blend of reality and fancy. I was no longer on the castle roof hearing the music coming from the stacks, but lying in my bed as the sound came from the cold hearth in my room. Contentedly I lay with the sounds of my harp emerging faintly out of the fireplace as if its strings were the parallel blackened iron bars of the grate.

I could hardly distinguish between waking and sleeping, dreaming that I was actually awake, yet somehow knowing that the wakefulness was part of the dream.

Slowly the music began to change. It became less melodic. I no longer recognized songs or tunes, only notes. Fingers strummed up and down the strings without regard for melodies or chords…random sounds as if one who knew nothing about the harp were plucking and strumming the strings to create
noise
rather than music.

Still I lay, gradually coming awake without realizing it, trying to recapture the exquisite roof harmonies of earlier in the dream.

But it was no use. Finally I realized I was drowsily awake…
really
awake. The music had gone. I lay for several seconds. The night was pitch black.

Suddenly my eyes shot open wide and a chill swept through my frame. Or…
had
the music entirely gone?

I strained to listen. I could still make out faint sounds from a harp!

It was the merest whisper, but there could be no doubt. Surely I was too far away from my studio to hear anything if Cora or Alicia were trying to cure insomnia with a little music in the middle of the night. Yet…was it possible that the sound could somehow travel through the interior of the castle for greater distances than I realized?

I lay a moment more. Suddenly I was feeling very strange.

I threw back the duvet, shivered briefly, and crept toward the fireplace. I knelt down and bent my ear toward the open hearth.

I gasped. The sound was coming from inside the chimney! It was a sound I would recognize anywhere, even though the notes emanating from it were faint and random and the sounds dissonant and musicless.

I was listening to the
Queen
!

My heart was pounding. My entire body crawled with goosefleshy tingles.

I sat back on the floor, thinking hard. I glanced at my clock. It was 1:47 a.m. No other sound disturbed the night…but the faint plucking of the
Queen
’s strings continued.

I stood, turned on the light, and hurriedly dressed.

Five minutes later I opened the door into my studio, fully expecting to find the light on and Cora or Alicia sitting at one of the other harps whose tone my sleepy brain had mistaken for the
Queen
’s.

But the room was dark and empty. All hint of sound was gone.

Bewildered, I slowly returned to the countess’s quarters, chalking the whole thing up to the fragmentary remnants of the dream left behind after my waking. Obviously I had not been as awake as I thought.

But the moment I walked in, an even deeper chill seized me than before. The sounds were still there! I dashed to the hearth and knelt again in front of it, with an exact repeat of the same sensations.

Notes
were
coming from deep inside the wall, through the fireplace chimney. They were definitely from the
Queen
!

I jumped up and moments later was flying down the private stairway, flashlight in hand, to the second floor. There I turned along the corridor to a series of onetime guest rooms that sat directly below the apartment I now occupied. Not locked and never used, I ran into the first, listened…then another…and finally a third. As I cocked my ear in front of its hearth, again I detected the sounds. I must be standing directly beneath my current sleeping quarters; the two fireplaces apparently shared a common chimney. The same weird disharmonious conglomeration of notes came from both!

Again I ran down the stairs to the first floor…with the same result…then to the ground floor, where I hurriedly investigated the storage rooms. I continued to hear sounds from one chimney on each floor. I had to find my way lower still! The chimney carrying the sound obviously originated in the basement.

I rose from my knees from the last hearth and ran, hardly caring who might hear me now, to the kitchen and pantry where Nicholls kept the keys he used to access the rooms of the basement. The ring of keys was not on the peg where I had seen him place it.

I turned again and ran to the stairway that led to the regions below, hoping to find the door at the base of the staircase unlocked. Obviously Nicholls had been down there during the day’s search for Olivia. He must have inadvertently left the keys in the lock.

Reaching the lower level, I found no sign of the keys. Just as I hoped, however, the door into the main basement corridor was open.

I hurried through it and along the corridor. There were not so many passageways on this subterranean level. By now I had a pretty good idea what I was looking for. The complete absence of noise in the studio and elsewhere indicated that the sound was being carried through the chimney, perhaps amplified in the narrow confined space like a megaphone. I had to find whatever room lay directly beneath those I had just examined and shared their chimney cavity.

I came to a joining of two halls. Judging as best I could, after having come so far and made so many turns, which way led west, I turned to my right and hurried along. I was certain that at last I was about to locate the
Queen
in one of the basement rooms where she had somehow eluded our most persistent searchings, a room that must coincidentally lie below the countess’s chambers and whose hearths shared a chimney. Whatever had unaccountably set the
Queen
’s strings vibrating—whether gust of wind or tremor of the ground—at the moment I did not stop to think that though we might have earthquakes in North America, they were utterly unknown in Scotland—the random sounds had drifted up to me where I slept. In its frantic attempt to explain the thing, my feverish brain almost imagined that the
Queen
, now that she had me in a place where I could hear her, was making music of herself, beckoning me to come rescue her at last.

Reaching the end of the hall, I saw a door to my left. In its lock, a key was inserted, with Nicholls’s ring of keys hanging from it.

Suddenly a horrible thought occurred to me. No wind could possibly vibrate the strings of the
Queen
with enough force to be heard several stories above me.

The green lady!

A terror of dreadful foreboding nearly drained my bones of courage. But I could not stop now. I swallowed hard and approached the door. Reaching out a trembling hand, I turned the key, slowly opened the door, and sent my flashlight around the cubical enclosure.

The room was empty. I had been so certain I was about to lay eyes on the
Queen
, with perhaps an ethereal form in green faintly visible beside her. Relieved to see no ghost, nevertheless my heart sank.

Across the room was an empty fireplace, long disused. I ran to it and knelt down.

Again came the unmistakable, random, dissonant nonmusic of the
Queen
’s strings! If possible, slightly louder than before.

Was I still dreaming?! Was I still lying upstairs in my bed, the music of the chimneys having now become random notes from imaginary dream-fireplaces in abandoned rooms in the bowels of the castle?

I stood and gazed about the room again.

No
, I thought.
This is no dream. I am wide awake!

But I was in the basement. I was at the bottom of the castle. Where could the sounds
possibly
be coming from? The
Queen
could not be on the roof—there was no way to get her there. She
must
be inside the castle. Surely this room held the clue!

I dashed back to the door and fumbled with the ring of keys and yanked the key from the lock. I looked them over one at a time. Why had Nicholls left them
here
? I ran back inside and scanned every inch of the room with the beam from my light. The stone walls, some damp, some mossy and grimy with age, seemed devoid of life…except for a tiny alcove cut into the wall about chest height with what appeared a perfect semicircular bowl cut into the flat vertical bottom stone.

Of course…a holy water font!

I spun around and examined the walls again. My eyes began to detect here and there an ancient carving cut into the stones. And—how could I have missed it?—a single decaying wooden cross with tarnished silver crucifix attached. This room was part of the ancient monastery!

Yet nothing else was here, other than…there, a small broom leaning against one corner. As I had with the crucifix, in my haste before I had missed it.

What an odd thing—a
broom
. Why here?

I set the light on the stone floor and reached for the handle. It was ancient with age and nearly falling apart, the ends of the clumped conglomeration of thin twigs bent almost to ninety degrees from years of use.

I set aside both key ring and flashlight and absently began gently sweeping at the dirt and dust from the corner where it stood. I swept back a foot, then two feet from where the two walls joined. Instead of the larger paving stones with which the rest of the room was tiled, those nearest the corner, I now saw as I swept the dirt from them, were smaller stones only six to eight inches square, perfectly shaped and set in place, yet covered with dirt and dust so they would not be noticed as distinct from the rest.

My curiosity aroused, I swept the smaller stones of the corner clean until the grooves between them appeared with greater clarity. The grooves surrounding one center stone appeared cut deeper than the rest. I knelt and probed with my finger. This center stone was held in place by loose dirt, not mortar. I scraped harder and harder, loosening the dirt to a depth of about half the length of my finger, then tried to grab the stone by its exposed edges. It was loose, held in place only by dirt swept over it to hide it from view.

I jiggled and pulled and after a little effort the stone gave way. I lifted it up and out of its resting place.

Beneath it, set in a bed of perfectly cut stones mortared in place beneath the level of the floor, was a six-inch oval brass plate, green and tarnished with age. I examined it with my light, then reached into the cavity and probed with my hand. The plate seemed intended to swivel, though with difficulty, from a small pin at its top. I pushed harder to pivot it sideways. As it swung away, below it my eyes fell upon a keyhole in the center of an ancient complex mechanism of brass.

I stared in disbelief. It was
so
old, how could it possibly still work? The next instant I had the ring of keys in my hands and was fumbling with one after another. The matching key was not difficult to find—it was the mysterious decorative key of brass. It fit the hole perfectly. I inserted it and turned. A dull clank sounded somewhere above me. The sound came from the adjacent wall, as if invisible pins, probably also of brass, had just given way inside it.

I stood and began examining the wall, pushing and probing with my free hand. Suddenly a portion of the wall gave way an inch or two. I gave a great shove with my shoulder and gasped in astonishment again as a door three feet wide swung back out of the wall, revealing a stone staircase behind it of equal width leading down into a chasm of blackness.

A rush of damp air met my face, almost—though it could hardly be—with reminders of the sea.

Without thought, I probed the tunnel yawning before me with the light of my torch, then began a new descent into unknown regions below.

I found myself walking down a long stairway. When I reached its base, a small blind alcove to the left led a short distance where, curiously, nothing was to be seen but a small air duct, which I could only assume supplied draft air for the system of chimneys.

I paused to allow the echo of my footfalls to die away. There could be no doubt. The sound of harp notes was more clear and pronounced now. This tunnel and duct could be none other than the source by which it had made its way above, there to invade my sleep with the harp-dreams that had instigated my search. The sound no longer came from the chimney duct, but from the corridor itself!

In the opposite direction from the alcove, a narrow tunnel led in the opposite direction into darkness. There were no rooms or doors. Its walls and ceilings were of dirt and stone and of about six feet in height. Alasdair would have had to stoop, but I could walk upright without banging my head. Even shining my light straight along its length, I could not see any end to it.

Heedless of what it all might mean, or the potential danger, not once thinking that not a soul knew where I was, I hurried into the tunnel toward the weird sounds.

The way before me was long and straight at first, then gradually curved a little left and then right again, though the turns were gradual. I came at length to where a wall of stones had at one time been erected to block the tunnel and prevent further passage. The stones had not been mortared in solidly but set in place dry, in the manner of a dry-stone dyke. I paused to assess what to do. At some later time, perhaps a third of the stones had been removed and were now stacked and strewn along the tunnel to one side out of the way.

The way through the conglomeration of random-shaped stones was passable, though not easily, just possibly wide enough that a pedal harp might be gotten through it, though the very thought of the damage that would result made me cringe. I crept through the opening and, once beyond the barrier, hurried on. The floor was now strewn with stones and debris and, if I dared look carefully, possibly bones. Alasdair’s spooky stories flooded my mind, and I did
not
look carefully. I couldn’t lose my nerve now!