The Burning Glass (35 page)

So the burning-glass wasn’t what it seemed.
Instead of focusing and illuminating the story of Ferniebank, it
simply reflected its viewer’s own desires. As with the original
story of Isabel and the squiggle on the inscription, perception was
reality. And for all her professed pragmatism, even Minty was not
at all immune from wishful thinking. Go figure, Jean told herself.
What else was new?

Alasdair called from the sidewalk, “Jean,
it’s gone two.”

With a sigh, she abandoned her
cogitations—not unlike abandoning a mine-working, leaving an open
shaft the unwary could fall down—and joined the others crossing the
street. “Gerald’s time, with its mediums and everything, wasn’t
much different from our own. People are still yearning for meaning
and explanation.”

“Even if they’re holding their hands over
their ears and humming when you give them the real thing,” added
Alasdair with a glance toward the garden gate, but Ciara was no
longer holding forth.

“Ah,” Michael said, “but what’s the real
thing, eh?”

In answer, Linda emitted an indignant cry.
Rebecca turned the pram toward the Reiver’s Rest. “Time for a
change and a feed. Let me know the next installment of the
breathtaking serial.”

“I’m holding out for ‘and they lived happily
ever after,’ ” Jean told her. “See you later.”

“I’d best be activating my pipes,” said
Michael, and opened the door of the pub.

The interior of the Granite Cross seemed even
less ventilated than when they’d left, steam substituted for air.
Michael reclaimed his bagpipes from Noel and took them outside. A
moment later the wails of bag-inflating and drone-tuning echoed
from the garden. Several people gathered up their provender and
headed outside for the show, but not before Ciara made her
entrance, swimming upstream as usual. “Ah, Jean! Bang on time—very
good!”

Alasdair made a dance step sideways and back,
trying to slip away into the crowd.

Too late. Ciara graced him with her sweetest
smile. “Alasdair, I said it was my shout. Name your poison.”

Flinching visibly at her choice of words, he
returned, “Thank you just the same. I’ll—” He stopped, staring at
the front door. “Later, ladies.”

Jean looked around to see Delaney just inside
the room, peering around myopically. Alasdair wove through the
crowd to his side and started speaking before Delaney could open
his mouth. Delaney listened, scowled, and pulled Alasdair back
through the doorway. Jean glimpsed three uniformed constables on
the sidewalk outside before the door swung shut.

“Good. They’ll keep each other busy whilst we
have ourselves a bit of a chin-wag,” Ciara said. “Beer? Lemonade?
Cider?”

Oh, to be in two places at once. Resigning
herself to obeying Newton’s laws, Jean found her notebook and pen
in her bag. “Nothing for me, thanks. Where would you like to
sit?”

“In the snug, back this way—it’s a wee bit
noisy in here, isn’t it? Not the pipes,” Ciara amended, as the
bravura peal of “Blue Bonnets over the Border” burst through the
back door. “They’re the instrument of the country. Along with the
harp, of course.”

“Val’s got a harp tattoo. Is she a
musician?”

“I don’t believe so, no,” Ciara said over her
shoulder. With a sigh, Jean followed her prey and nemesis into an
alcove in the far corner of the pub, an intimate enough setting to
merit the designation of “snug.” Two young men were playing
billiards, spending as much time balancing their pint glasses on
the edge of the table as lining up their shots. To one side sat
three small tables, one unoccupied. “Here we are.” Ciara deposited
her glass of white wine on the table, her woven shoulder-bag on the
floor, and herself on a chair.

Jean took the seat providing a view that
squeaked past the corner to the front door. “Is this where you had
your dinner with Angus and Minty and everyone last night?”

“Oh aye,” said Ciara, not asking how Jean
knew about that. “All the usual suspects, eh?”

Jean didn’t retort, “So you think murder is a
joke?” Ciara simply wasn’t leaping to the same conclusions a
cynical journalist and an even more cynical ex-cop were leaping
to.

“Minty, Angus, Noel, Polly, and Keith,” Ciara
counted off. “Val was working in the kitchen, behind the scenes so
to speak, and Zoe and Shannon were rushing to and fro, and Derek .
. . Well, Derek has a bit of a jumbled aura just now, but he’s a
good lad.”

A good lad with a habit of sneaking around
Ferniebank, Jean thought.

“Polly and Noel were popping up and
down—Saturday night in the pub, mind, and the local musicians
playing in the front room. Minty was getting at Noel to upgrade his
catering, though, just between us, Jean, I’m finding it hard to
trust a cook who’s that thin. Doesn’t eat enough of her own food,
does she?”

The issue of trust went beyond body shape.
“Her luncheon was tasty enough, haggis and all.”

“She had Polly cooking, just as she once had
Helen cooking. Minty, she stands on the bridge and gives orders
whilst the oarsmen—oarswomen—do the heavy lifting.”

Jean did not disagree. “You’ve known everyone
here in Stanelaw for a long time?”

“A few years, aye.”

Tempted as Jean was to ask again about
Valerie, who had not been in Stanelaw for a few years, that would
come too close on the heels of Alasdair’s admonition to Ciara to
’fess up. Right now she was playing good cop. “Last night, did
Angus say where’d he been?”

“He tours about to get away from Minty.
Brussels, London, the Yorkshire Dales. She means well, but she’s
treating him like a dog or a horse, not a husband.”

Without commenting on Ciara’s use of the
present tense, Jean jotted down the particulars. “He was with you
at Ferniebank Saturday morning, before Minty knew he was back.”

“That’s hardly the sinister plot Alasdair’s
making it out to be.” Ciara’s laugh echoed the clatter of the
billiard balls. “I didn’t know whether Angus meant to make his
reappearance just yet is all. I should have organized myself
better, so as not to put Shan on the spot, poor lass. But you mind
what they say about discretion and valor—and working with Minty
takes a wheen of both.”

No kidding
. “You and Angus, ah, must
have seen eye to eye on your plans for Ferniebank.”

“We got on well enough, Angus and I.”

Saturday morning they weren’t getting on too
well. There was another evasion, which, as Alasdair had said, left
Jean to make assumptions. And what she assumed was that yes, Angus
had been put out at some aspect of Ciara’s schemes, but Ciara had
dismissed his concerns.

“As for the plans,” Ciara went on, “they’ve
been finalized and construction’s beginning next month. Keith has
it all in hand, though Minty was that, well, we’ll say interested,
she kept after him for the details. If we all vanished the night,
Ferniebank Conference and Healing Center would still be rising from
the ruins.”

“Angus did vanish. So did Wallace, less than
two weeks ago.”

Ciara looked down at her soft white hands,
idly rotating a ring formed like a dragon holding its tail in its
mouth. “As the prayer says, in the midst of life we are in death.
Unless it’s the other way round, in the midst of death we are in
life. I never can remember. It’s a shame folk are frightened of
dying, when it’s no more than translation to another plane.”

Jean bit her tongue before she could ask,
“Would you feel that way if your skirts were on fire and a gang of
brutes was coming at you, swords raised?” Instead she tried, “How
did you find Ferniebank to begin with?”

“I once worked for a company specializing in
wee booklets for tourists. Several included the story of
Ferniebank’s ‘gray lady.’ Whilst I was setting the tours for Mystic
Scotland, I stopped by and found that Wallace was an old soul like
me. One who’s aware of other dimensions.”

Does that mean, Jean wondered, that Alasdair
and I are antediluvian souls? She tried another leading question.
“You said Friday that you and Keith would have to come back after
nightfall to see Isabel’s ghost. A shame you didn’t make it that
night. You might have caught—er—whoever chipped away the
inscription. And last night you might have been able to help
Angus.”

Ciara toyed with her ring, her springy red
curls curtaining her profile. “Well,” she said at last, “you and
Alasdair, you didn’t need eavesdroppers and trespassers just then,
did you? With him being so meticulous and all.”

Jean felt her tongue cleave to the roof of
her mouth and her face flush.

“Though meticulous can lead onto pernickety.
See Minty.” Ciara looked up, her blue eyes, a more luxuriant shade
than Alasdair’s, dancing. “Birds do it, bees do it, you and
Alasdair do it, Keith and I do it—nothing embarrassing about it. A
bit of rumpy pumpy is all to the good, isn’t it? Like music and a
good meal. Gather your rosebuds.”

Jean thought of wispy Keith, needing his food
to keep his energy up and his client happy. She thought of Valerie
gathering rosebuds and coming up with the thorn that was Derek. She
thought of Alasdair as meticulous, even fussy—yeah, he and Minty
did have a few traits in common. She thought that Ciara maybe had
gone on the offensive to deflect uncomfortable questions about
coming and going surreptitiously at Ferniebank.

A drop of sweat trickled down her back
beneath her blouse, drawing her follicles erect like the delicate
touch of Alasdair’s fingertips. Or like the ectoplasmic tickle of a
ghost. She cleared her throat to recall the meeting to order, and
realized too late that was Alasdair’s trick. Ciara acknowledged the
reference with a smile of such surpassing sweetness Jean wanted to
ask for a shot of insulin on the side. She said, “Ferniebank.
You’ve made some major discovery, it sounds like. Something about
the Sinclairs? Or the Saint Clairs, rather?”

“You’ve heard about the book, then? Your
sources are good as Minty’s.” Ciara’s eyes went from dancing to
glinting, humor sharpened into something between glee and zealotry.
“That’s why I asked everyone to dinner last night, to celebrate
Wallace’s and my grand discovery and the book deal. Although, if
the truth be told . . .”

If only, Jean thought.

“ . . . I let the news slip to Shannon on the
Friday, whilst we were planning itineraries—that girl should be
sitting her exams again, she’s a bit dyslexic is all. I’m sure Shan
told her family and I myself told Angus and Minty earlier the
Saturday, with them being investors and the like.”

“The discovery and the book will make their
investment pay off, right?”

“As a side effect, aye. Not that I’m turning
away money—useful item, money. But the bottom line is nonmaterial.
Folk are yearning for spirituality and connection. For meaning.
You’re writing about that yourself, aren’t you now?”

“In a way, yes.”

“My life’s journey brought me to Ferniebank,
where I met Wallace, a fellow traveler. Now his journey is ended
and his part in the story is over. But he’s passed on to me the
responsibility of moving the story toward harmony and away from the
tyranny of the religious thought-police. I’ve organized a press
conference for the day we break ground at Ferniebank.”

If Ciara wasn’t perfectly sincere, Jean would
eat her notebook. “You can go ahead and tell me. My magazine’s a
monthly. Anything I write up now won’t be published until January.”
She didn’t add that she could call Miranda’s contact at
The
Scotsman
and have the story in tomorrow’s paper—she was in this
business out of curiosity, not competitiveness. And Ciara was
obviously bursting with the news. She probably couldn’t keep
Christmas and birthday presents under wraps, either.

“Well then.” Leaning toward Jean
conspiratorially, Ciara murmured, “You’ve read that book claiming
the Holy Grail is actually Mary Magdalen and that she was buried in
Rosslyn for a time.”

Jean had to crane forward to hear her over
the sounds of people talking, the television announcer, billiard
balls clashing like skulls, the rant of the pipes. Her nostrils
filled with Ciara’s perfume, which today reminded her of incense.
“I’ve read it, yes. It’s fiction. The author took stories that have
been around for ages—there’ve been tales about the Templars for
hundreds of years—and grafted them onto a modern thriller. . . .”
She snapped her teeth together and wrote “listen” in the middle of
her page.

“I’ll be setting the record straight,” stated
Ciara.

Jean waited for Ciara’s definition of
“straight” before she handed out compliments.

“The romantic story of Isabel and the monk
and the burning-glass and all, Gerald Rutherford wrote that to
cover up the real story. Which is also romance, but in the larger
meaning.”

“Ah, yes. Isabel was actually Mary Stuart’s
secret courier.”

“Oh, not that. That story’s a cover-up as
well. Gerald had a fine time weaving that with the truth in his
poem about Isabel playing the harp for Mary. Not that I’d recommend
reading his poem—it’s like treading treacle. Still, it was right
clever of Gerald and then Wallace, hiding the truth behind not one
but two plausible stories.”

Listen
.

“You’ve seen Rosslyn, I reckon. You’ve seen
Ferniebank. Same style. Same masons, like as not. No surprise,
then, that at Ferniebank as well as Rosslyn the arrangement of the
carvings, especially those wee boxes alongside the pillars,
designate vibration frequencies. Pity they’ve been damaged, but by
comparing the better-preserved carvings at Rosslyn, we can
extrapolate.”

We can, can we? Jean retorted silently. The
vibration frequencies of Michael’s pipes were making the dust motes
dance a reel. She felt her feet tapping, and had to stop herself
from getting up and tapping away. But no. The debatable shore where
fantasy and reality intersected was her territory, her mandate,
even if sometimes it resembled quicksand.