The Burning Glass (33 page)

Considering what? Which part of Ciara’s
plans, Jean wondered, were she and Angus discussing in the van
yesterday morning, before Minty knew he was back? Something as
mundane as the local authority’s consent for alteration of the
property? Or something esoteric?

“Was anyone else at dinner with you?”
Alasdair asked.

“Keith, Noel, and Polly, who had Valerie
Trotter working in the kitchen. The woman is doing her best, I
suppose. As for that lad of hers, well, he was hanging about.” The
light streaming through the window drew harsh shadows on Minty’s
deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and pursed lips, no longer glistening
peach but colorless. She looked as though she’d been pinched in a
vise, no surprise there.

Turning the sharp angle of her shoulder
toward Alasdair, she reached to a bank of switches on the wall and
flicked each one. First the ceiling light, and then the lights in
the display cases quivered on. “This museum is Angus and Uncle
Wallace’s legacy. The story of Stanelaw and Ferniebank and their
roles in the history not just of Scotland, but of Britain.”

“The Sinclairs made the equivalent of
headlines for several hundred years,” Jean said. “They still are,
in some circles. How else would Ciara get a book contract for
something called
The Secret Code of the St. Clairs?
”

“How, indeed? Popular culture makes fools of
us all these days. What a tawdry, vulgar world we live in.” Minty’s
back, all that Jean could see of her, would have made a ramrod look
slumped.

Jean shrugged her shoulders, Alasdair his
brows. Okay, so that had been a shot in the dark. And it proved
that Ciara hadn’t hidden her book from Minty—not that Mrs.
Councillor Rutherford was happy about it. Funny how Roddy and
Minty, each from his or her perspective, saw something so similar.
“Roddy Elliot was saying that Ciara’s plans for Ferniebank are
blasphemy.”

“Roddy,” said Minty, “is too superstitious
for his own good. Not unlike Ciara, if in a very different fashion.
Helen was a saint, moderating his fits of rancor, but now she’s
gone.”

Alasdair extended the plastic container.
“Here’s the bit of Isabel’s grave inscription. The one we found
Friday evening.”

“Thank you.” Minty set the container down
beside her black leather handbag on the windowsill, crossed her
arms over her black jacket buttons, and frowned. Maybe they should
have packed the stone in something more appropriate, like a
Harrod’s hatbox. Not that this was a good time, Minty’s summons
notwithstanding. Discreetly, Jean headed right and Alasdair headed
left.

The museum building might be medieval stone,
walls thick and ceilings low, but its exhibits had been designed to
twenty-first-century standards. Displays were sleek and minimalist,
glass pane abutted to glass pane, artifacts raised on Lucite
pedestals instead of nested on velvet, like tiny spaceships
launching themselves into the past. They hadn’t come any cheaper
than the cooking school. But then, Angus and Minty probably had a
grant for the museum like the one for Ferniebank.

With the feeling she was searching for
something but didn’t know what it was—she’d had nightmares like
this—Jean eyed Roman votive figurines from St. Mary’s well,
pottery, metal implements,
objets d’art
, a wood and brass
medieval money chest, coins from the medieval Roxburgh mint, and
coins of Mary, Queen of Scots. A letter from Mary was mounted
beneath a lamp attached to a motion sensor so that it was only
illuminated when someone bent to read it. A shame one corner of the
yellowed paper had been torn away. . . .
Hey
, Jean thought.
A scrap of sixteenth-century paper had been found in the harp.

She read the label: “Letter from Mary, Queen
of Scots, to William Sinclair of Ferniebank, thanking him for his
hospitality after recovering from her illness in late 1566.” Fine.
As far as Jean was concerned, the message could be Mary’s laundry
list. Not only was the spidery sixteenth-century writing almost
illegible, what she could read showed that the letter was in an
almost impenetrable Scots, not English. Still, she had to assume
the label was correct, and that this was not the sort of letter
that needed to be smuggled anywhere. Rats.

To one side rose a tall glass case like
Moses’s column of fire, brightly illuminated, the focus of the room
no less because it was empty. Jean knew what had been there before
she got close enough to read the plaque: “The Ferniebank
Clarsach.”

Alasdair was already inspecting the blue
crescents of chipped safety glass above a splintered rim of wood.
“This was pried open. Why did the thief not smash, grab, and
run?”

“Why did the thief dismantle the clarsach and
then return the pieces?” asked Jean.

“Perhaps the thief was looking for another
secret compartment. Perhaps his conscience got the best of
him.”

“Or her conscience.” Minty strolled across
the room, her arms enlacing her chest, her heels clicking and the
floor groaning.

“Logan had this glass tested for
fingerprints, did he?”

“Forensics found only those of tourists who
couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. The thief wore
gloves.”

Jean envisioned a black-masked burglar
wearing prissy, white, artifact-handling gloves. “How did the thief
get in?”

“We use a small room in the back as a
kitchen. Its window overlooks an alley. The Saturday was warm. The
receptionist most unfortunately neglected to lock the window when
she closed up, and the thief was able to open it. The alarm went
when he opened this display case. P.C. Logan responded
straightaway, but it was too late.”

Alasdair’s brows tightened, perhaps imagining
the receptionist’s head mounted on a spike outside Glebe House.
“The thief happened by just when the window was left open?”

“He could well have been watching for an
opportunity,” said Minty.

“A right meticulous thief he was, then. But
we already know that.”

Minty loosened her crossed arms enough to
raise a hand toward a large color photo of the harp. Its wood was
dark with time and perhaps smoke, but gleaming still. The curvature
of its body was repeated by its curvilinear ornamentation,
artistically shadowed by the photographer’s lights. Hollows that
once held jewelry seemed like sad, dark eyes. The carving on the
front brace was almost three-dimensional, a scaled snake or dragon
curling upwards and no doubt humming along with the music.

“It’s beautiful,” Jean said.

“Have you heard from the museum?” asked
Alasdair.

“Repairs are under way. The conservators tell
me they’ve uncovered a secret compartment in the front brace,
beneath the salmon.”

So the sculpture was of the mythical salmon
of inspiration. Minty could no doubt do something inspirational
with salmon, probably involving butter, pepper, and herbs. “Was
Isabel smuggling messages in aid of Mary, Queen of Scots?” Jean
asked.

“So it seems. She intrigued for Mary during
the rebellion of the northern earls in 1569, the attempt to put
Mary back on the throne after her flight to England.”

“Ciara said something about Gerald concealing
bothersome historical truths. Or at least spinning them into
something more acceptable during his life, if not now. Is that one
of them? Isabel as secret agent?”

“Yes.” Minty stepped toward a TV screen set
into the wall beside the photo. Her forefinger with its short but
manicured nail pressed a button.

The screen lit with an image of Hugh actually
dressed in a suit and tie, holding the harp as tenderly as a small
child. Or, considering the slow stroke of his fingertips down its
curve, as tenderly as a lover.
A musical instrument unplayed is
like a woman unloved
. He raised his cherubic face and began
speaking to the camera. . . .

From the entrance hall came the sound of the
front door opening. Michael’s voice called, “Hullo? May we come
in?”

Minty spun about, keeping her balance despite
the diameter of her heels. “The museum is closed just now.”

Rebecca looked through the doorway. “It’s my
husband and I.”

“Ah,” said Minty. “Well then. You’ve been
wanting a look round, haven’t you, Dr. Campbell-Reid? And you as
well, Dr. Campbell-Reid,” she told Michael as he rolled the pram to
a stop at the foot of the staircase and set its brakes.

Hugh’s electronic voice was lilting about how
the Lowland harp had faded from popularity when Mary’s son James VI
of Scotland went to London to become James I of Britain and the
court became anglicized. Something similar happened to the Highland
harp 150 years later, in the aftermath of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s
disastrous rebellion. “We have one surviving piece with a
specifically Lowland title, ‘The Keiking Glass.’ Perhaps Isabel
Sinclair played it.”

His fingers plucked the harp strings and a
melody filled the air, each note dropping like that rain from
heaven that was the quality of mercy, not to mention beauty. Jean
looked around at Alasdair, and met his gaze coming back the other
way. Yes, Isabel had played that song. She’d played it for them
Friday night.

Alasdair suddenly found the floor of great
interest, but Jean could still make out the reminiscent quirk on
his lips. Her own shiver had a lot more to do with the flesh than
the spectral.

Michael and Rebecca drifted into the room.
Minty stood with her arms knotted, her face a rock scree dusted
with snow, coming forth with no more of Isabel’s story.

Patiently, Jean and Alasdair turned toward
another display case, this one holding a miniature of Isabel,
off-center, as though a second object had once sat beside it.

Isabel was depicted from the waist up, her
layers of clothing and ornament, her starched collar and winged
cap, making her exposed hands and face seem as vulnerable as the
soft creature inside a shell. Her features were probably idealized,
and yet, still, they were features Jean and Alasdair had seen
before. One long, tapering hand held a jeweled cross and the other
curved toward it—this, she seemed to be saying, this particular
myth is my center.

The music faded into a faint resonance and
died. Jean looked up to a picture hanging above the portrait, a pen
and ink drawing almost overwhelmed by an ornate Victorian or
Edwardian frame. . . . Her heart oozed down into her toes. While
the style of the drawing, the swoop of the line and the use of
shadow, evoked Gibson Girls and
Saturday Evening Post
covers, the subject was Isabel running toward the castle. Every
detail repeated the ghostly image she and Alasdair had glimpsed the
night before, from slippers to feathered cap to the expression that
was both fearful and determined.

Beside her, Jean heard Alasdair catch his
breath. He bent forward—yes, the sketch was signed “G. Rford 1910.”
If the miniature was from the life, then this was from the death.
Gerald, too, had been allergic to ghosts. “Was this hanging in the
bedroom of the flat at Ferniebank?”

“Yes, it was,” said Minty. “Gerald and
Wallace, they were both gentleman artists, unskilled but
adequate.”

“Wallace’s leaflet says that Isabel’s ghost
walks from the castle down to the chapel, wearing a shroud.”

“That there’s a ghost at all is one of the
fairy tales first Gerald and then Wallace created and advertised,
and that now have taken on a life of their own.” Minty’s slight
frown would in anyone else have been a scowl.

Rebecca and Michael ranged up on Jean’s other
side and gazed at the photo, their knowing glances catching the
implication of her question.

“Why do you suppose Gerald showed her
running?” Jean asked.

“Because she ran to escape her murderers,”
said Minty.

In the sudden, profound silence, Jean could
hear every breath, the hum of the video machine, the voices from
the beer garden across the street, Linda’s gurgles in the front
hall.

Then, with a chill teasing the back of her
neck, Jean remembered the hacked bones pictured in the Ancient
Monuments book. Those were Isabel’s. No wonder that upstairs room
was haunted. She and Alasdair should have heard screams, seen the
desperate struggle, but no, all they had sensed was the aftermath.
Quiet as the grave. Still as death
. “Her enemies caught
her,” she said.

Minty’s lips curled, but she wasn’t smiling.
“Wallace based his guide leaflet on the story handed down in the
family, fearfully common one that it is. After he retired and moved
house to the castle, however, he organized Gerald’s papers and a
few of his original sources such as Queen Mary’s letter. Ciara was
correct in one regard: Gerald did bowdlerize the true story.”

Then Roddy was correct, too, Jean
thought.

“The truth, however, is much less
sensationalistic than Ciara will admit to, with her . . ..” A
tremor of emotion crossed Minty’s face, but was gone before Jean
could identify it. “Mary’s enemies rode up to the castle as Isabel
was returning from the chapel, where she had a confederate—not a
lover, a confederate. She barricaded herself in her room.”

“And began burning the correspondence
entrusted to her,” said Alasdair, who had also seen the rosy gleam
of flames in the windows of Isabel’s room. “That’s when her skirts
caught fire.”

“Very clever, Mr. Cameron. Her skirts caught
fire indeed. At that instant her assailants burst through the door
and stabbed her to death, then fought their way out of the
castle.”

Everyone seemed to be restraining their
living breaths. At last Rebecca said, “I reckon her own family put
the expurgated version about. It wasn’t healthy to be seen taking
the wrong side.”

“Loyalties are often more complex than the
ordinary person realizes,” Minty returned.

Like truth, Jean thought. Especially when the
truth is being spun like a wheel of fortune, round and round and
where it stops nobody knows.