An Echo in the Bone, Page 61

  and Rob Cameron leaned out of the window, calling to them.

  “Like it, did ye, Rob?” Menzies asked, still beaming.

  “Loved it,” Cameron said, with every evidence of sincerity. “Two things, Rog—I wanted to ask, maybe, if ye’d let me see some of the old songs ye have; Siegfried MacLeod showed me the ones you did for him.”

  Roger was a little taken aback, but pleased.

  “Aye, sure,” he said. “Didn’t know you were a fan,” he joked.

  “I love all the old stuff,” Cameron said, serious for once. “Really, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Okay, then. Come on out to the house, maybe, next weekend?”

  Rob grinned and saluted briefly.

  “Wait—two things, ye said?” Menzies asked.

  “Oh, aye.” Cameron reached over and picked up something from the seat between Bobby and him. “This was in with the Gaelic bits ye were handing round. It looked as though it was in there by mistake, though, so I took it out. Writing a novel, are ye?”

  He handed out the black notebook, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” and Roger’s throat clenched as though he’d been garroted. He took the notebook, nodding speechlessly.

  “Maybe ye’ll let me read it when it’s done,” Cameron said casually, putting his truck in gear. “I’m a great one for the science fiction.”

  The truck pulled away, then stopped suddenly and reversed. Roger took a firmer grip on the notebook, but Rob didn’t look at it.

  “Hey,” he said. “Forgot. Brianna said ye’ve got an old stone fort or some such on your place?”

  Roger nodded, clearing his throat.

  “I’ve got a friend, an archaeologist. Would ye mind, maybe, if he was to come and have a look at it sometime?”

  “No,” Roger croaked, then cleared his throat again and said more firmly, “No, that’d be fine. Thanks.”

  Rob grinned cheerfully at him and revved the engine.

  “Nay bother, mate,” he said.

  HIGH PLACES

  ROB’S ARCHAEOLOGIST friend, Michael Callahan, turned out to be a genial bloke in his fifties with thinning sandy hair, sunburned so badly and so often that his face looked like patchwork, dark freckles blotched among patches of raw pink skin. He ferreted about among the collapsed stones of the old church with every sign of interest, asking Roger’s permission to dig a trench along the outside of one wall.

  Rob, Brianna, and the kids all came up briefly to watch, but archaeological work is not a spectator sport, and when Jem and Mandy got bored, the lot of them went down to the house to make lunch, leaving Roger and Mike to their poking.

  “I don’t need you,” Callahan said, glancing up at Roger after a bit. “If you’ve things to do.”

  There were always things to do—it was a farm, after all, if a small one—but Roger shook his head.

  “I’m interested,” he said. “If I won’t be in your way… ?”

  “Not a bit of it,” Callahan said cheerfully. “Come and help me lift this, then.”

  Callahan whistled through his teeth as he worked, occasionally muttering to himself, but for the most part made no comment on whatever he was looking at. Roger was called on now and then to help clear away rubble or hold an unstable stone while Callahan peered underneath it with a small torch, but for the most part Roger sat on the bit of uncollapsed wall, listening to the wind.

  It was quiet on the hilltop, in the way that wild places are quiet, with a constant sense of unobtrusive movement, and it struck him odd that this should be so. Normally you didn’t get that feeling in places where people had lived, and plainly people had been mucking about on this hilltop for a good long time, judging from the depth of Callahan’s trench and the small whistles of interest he gave off now and then, like a marmoset.

  Brianna brought them up sandwiches and lemonade and sat down beside Roger on the wall to eat.

  “Rob gone off, then?” Roger asked, noticing that the truck was gone from the dooryard.

  “Just to run some errands, he said. He said it didn’t look as though Mike would be finished anytime soon,” she said, with a glance at Callahan’s trouser seat, this sticking out from a bush as he burrowed happily beneath it.

  “Maybe not,” Roger said, smiling, and leaning forward, kissed her lightly. She made a low, contented noise in her throat and stepped back, but kept hold of his hand for a moment.

  “Rob asked about the old songs you did up for Sandy MacLeod,” she said, with a sideways glance down toward the house. “Did you tell him he could see them?”

  “Oh, aye, I’d forgot that. Sure. If I’m not down when he comes back, you can show him them. The originals are in my bottom file drawer, in a folder labeled Cèolas.”

  She nodded and went down, long sneakered feet sure as a deer’s on the stony path, and her hair down her back in a tail the color of the same deer’s pelt.

  As the afternoon wore on, he found himself dropping into a state not far off trance, his mind moving sluggishly and his body not much faster, coming in leisurely fashion to lend a hand where wanted, exchanging the barest of words with Callahan, who seemed similarly bemused. The drifting haze of the morning had thickened, and the cool shadows amid the stones faded with the light. The air was cool with water on his skin, but there was no hint of rain. You could almost feel the stones rising up around you, he thought, coming back to what they once were.

  There were comings and goings at the house below: the slam of doors, Brianna hanging out the family wash, the kids and a couple of wee lads from the next farm over who’d come to spend the night with Jem all racing through the kailyard and outbuildings, playing some kind of tag that involved a good deal of noise, their shrieks high and sharp as the cries of fishing ospreys. Once he glanced down and saw the Farm and Household truck, presumably come to deliver the pump for the cream separator, for Roger saw Brianna shepherding the driver into the barn, he unable to see around the large carton in his arms.

  Around five, a fresh strong breeze came up, and the haze began to dissipate. As though this was a signal waking Callahan from his dream, the archaeologist straightened, stood a moment looking down at something, then nodded.

  “Well, it may be an ancient site,” he said, climbing out of his trench and groaning as he leaned to and fro, stretching his back. “The structure’s not, though. Likely built sometime in the last couple of hundred years, though whoever built it used much older stones in the construction. Probably brought them from somewhere else, though some may be from an earlier structure built on the spot.” He smiled at Roger. “Folk are thrifty in the Highlands; last week I saw a barn with an ancient Pictish stone used in the foundation and a floor made with bricks from a demolished public lavatory in Dornoch.”

  Callahan looked out to the west, shading his eyes, where the haze now hung low over the distant shore.

  “High places,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They always chose the high places, the old ones. Whether it was a fort or a place of worship, they always went up.”

  “The old ones?” Roger asked, and felt a brief prickle of the hair on his nape. “Which old ones?”

  Callahan laughed, shaking his head.

  “Don’t know. Picts, maybe—all we know about them is the bits of stonework they left here and there—or the folk who came before them. Sometimes you see a bit of something that you know was made—or at least placed—by men, but can’t fit it into a known culture. The megaliths, for instance—the standing stones. Nobody knows who set those up or what for.”

  “Don’t they,” Roger murmured. “Can you tell what sort of ancient site this was? For war or worship, I mean?”

  Callahan shook his head.

  “Not from what’s apparent on the surface, no. Maybe if we excavated the underlying site—but to be honest, I don’t see anything that would make anyone really want to do that. There are hundreds of sites like this on high places, all through the British Isles and Brittany, too—old Celtic, many of them, Iron Age, lots much older.” He picked up the b
attered saint’s head, stroking it with a sort of affection.

  “This lady’s much more recent; maybe the thirteenth, fourteenth century. Maybe the family’s patron saint, handed down over the years.” He gave the head a brief, unself-conscious kiss and handed it gently to Roger.

  “For what it’s worth, though—and this isn’t scientific, just what I think myself, having seen more than a few such places—if the modern structure was a chapel, then the ancient site beneath it was likely a place of worship, too. Folk in the Highlands are set in their ways. They may build a new barn every two or three hundred years—but chances are it’ll be right where the last one stood.”

  Roger laughed.

  “True enough. Our barn’s still the original one—built in the early 1700s, along with the house. But I found the stones of an earlier croft buried when I dug up the stable floor to put in a new drain.”

  “The 1700s? Well, you’ll not be needing a new roof for at least another hundred years, then.”

  It was nearly six but still full daylight. The haze had vanished in that mysterious way it sometimes did, and a pale sun had come out. Roger traced a small cross with his thumb on the statue’s forehead and set the head gently in the niche that seemed made for it. They’d finished, but neither man made a move to leave just yet. There was a sense of comfort in each other’s company, a sharing of the spell of the high place.

  Down below, he saw Rob Cameron’s battered truck parked in the dooryard and Rob himself sitting on the back stoop, Mandy, Jem, and Jem’s friends leaning in on either side of him, evidently absorbed in the pages he held. What the devil was he doing?

  “Is that singing I hear?” Callahan, who had been looking off to the north, turned half round, and as he did so, Roger heard it, too. Faint and sweet, no more than a thread of sound, but enough to pick up the tune of “Crimond.”

  The strength of the stab of jealousy that went through him took his breath, and he felt his throat close as though some strong hand choked him.

  Jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire.

  He closed his eyes for an instant, breathing slow and deep, and with a little effort, dredged up the first bit of that quotation: Love is strong as death.

  He felt the choking sensation begin to ease and reason return. Of course Rob Cameron could sing; he was in the men’s choir. Only make sense that if he saw the rudimentary musical settings Roger had noted for some of the old songs, he’d try to sing them. And kids—especially his kids—were attracted to music.

  “Have you known Rob for long, then?” he asked, and was pleased to hear his voice sound normal.

  “Oh, Rob?” Callahan considered. “Fifteen years, maybe… No, I tell a lie, more like twenty. He came along as a volunteer on a dig I had going on Shapinsay—that’s one of the Orkneys—and he wasn’t but a lad then, in his late teens, maybe.” He gave Roger a mild, shrewd look. “Why?”

  Roger shrugged.

  “He works with my wife, for the Hydro Board. I don’t know him much myself. Only met him recently, in lodge.”

  “Ah.” Callahan watched the scene below for a moment, silent, then said, not looking at Roger, “He was married, to a French girl. Wife divorced him a couple of years ago, took their son back to France. He’s not been happy.”

  “Ah.” That explained Rob’s attachment to his widowed sister’s family, then, and his enjoyment of Jem and Mandy’s company. He breathed once more, freely, and the small flame of jealousy flickered out.

  As though this brief exchange had put a period to the day, they picked up the leavings from their lunch and Callahan’s rucksack and came down the hill, companionable in silence.

  “WHAT’S THIS?” There were two wineglasses set on the counter. “Are we celebrating something?”

  “We are,” Bree said firmly. “The children going to bed, for one thing.”

  “Oh, bad, were they?” He felt a small twinge of guilt—not very severe— for having spent the afternoon in the high, cool peace of the ruined chapel with Callahan rather than chivvying small mad things out of the kailyard.

  “Just really energetic.” She cast a suspicious glance toward the door to the hall, through which the muted roar of a television came from the big front parlor. “I hope they’ll be too worn out to spend the night jumping on the beds. They’ve had enough pizza to put six grown men into a coma for a week.”

  He laughed at that—he’d eaten most of a full-sized pepperoni himself and was beginning to feel comfortably stuporous.

  “What else?”

  “Oh, what else are we celebrating?” She gave him a cat-in-the-cream look. “Well, as for me …”

  “Yes?” he said, obliging.

  “I’ve passed the provisional employment period; now I’m permanent, and they can’t get rid of me, even if I wear perfume to work. And you,” she added, reaching into the drawer and placing an envelope in front of him, “are formally invited by the school board to do a reprise of your Gàidhlig triumph at five different schools next month!”

  He felt a moment’s shock, then a warm flood of something he couldn’t quite identify, and realized with a greater shock that he was blushing.

  “Really?”

  “You don’t think I’d tease you about something like that?” Not waiting for an answer, she poured the wine, purple-rich and aromatic, and handed him a glass. He clinked it ceremoniously against her own.

  “Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us?”

  “Damned few,” she replied in broad Scots, “and they’re all deid.”

  THERE WAS A certain amount of crashing upstairs after the children were sent to bed, but a brief appearance by Roger in the persona of Heavy Father put a stop to that, and the slumber party simmered down into storytelling and stifled giggles.

  “Are they telling dirty jokes?” Bree asked, when he came back down.

  “Very likely. Ought I make Mandy come down, do you think?”

  She shook her head.

  “She’s probably asleep already. And if not, the sort of jokes nine-year-old boys tell won’t warp her. She isn’t old enough to remember the punch lines.”

  “That’s true.” Roger took up his refilled glass and sipped, the wine soft on his tongue and dense with the scents of black currant and black tea. “How old was Jem when he finally learned to tell jokes? You remember how he got the form of jokes but didn’t really understand the idea of content?”

  “What’s the difference between a … a … a button and a sock?” she mimicked, catching Jem’s breathless excitement to a T. “A… BUFFALO! HAHAHAHAHA!”

  Roger burst out laughing.

  “Why are you laughing?” she demanded. Her eyes were growing heavy-lidded, and her lips were stained dark.

  “Must be the way you tell it,” he said, and lifted his glass to her. “Cheers.”

  “Slàinte.”

  He closed his eyes, breathing the wine as much as drinking it. He was beginning to have the pleasant illusion that he could feel the heat of his wife’s body, though she sat a few feet away. She seemed to emanate warmth, in slow, pulsing waves.

  “What do they call it, how you find distant stars?”

  “A telescope,” she said. “You can’t be drunk on half a bottle of wine, good as it is.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. There’s a term for it—heat signature? Does that sound right?”

  She closed one eye, considering, then shrugged.

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “You’ve got one.”

  She looked down at herself, squinting.

  “Nope. Two. Definitely two.”

  He wasn’t quite drunk, and neither was she, but whatever they were was a lot of fun.

  “A heat signature,” he said, and, reaching out, took hold of her hand. It was markedly warmer than his, and he was positive he could feel the heat of her fingers throb slowly, increasing and diminishing with her pulse. “I could pick you out of a crowd blindfolded; you glow in the dark.”

  She put asi
de her glass and slid out of her chair, coming to a stop kneeling between his knees, her body not quite touching his. She did glow. If he closed his eyes, he could just about see it through the white shirt she wore.

  He tipped up his glass and drained it.

  “Great wine. Where did ye get it?”

  “I didn’t. Rob brought it—a thank-you, he said, for letting him copy the songs.”

  “Nice guy,” he said generously. At the moment, he actually thought so.

  Brianna reached for the wine bottle and poured the last of it into Roger’s glass. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at him owl-eyed, the empty bottle clutched to her chest.

  “Hey. You owe me.”

  “Big-time,” he assured her gravely, making her giggle.

  “No,” she said, recovering. “You said if I brought my hard hat home, you’d tell me what you were doing with that champagne bottle. All that hooting, I mean.”

  “Ah.” He considered for a moment—there was a distinct possibility she’d hit him with the wine bottle if he told her, but then, a bargain was a bargain, after all—and the vision of her naked save for the hard hat, radiating heat in all directions, was enough to make a man cast caution to the winds.

  “I was trying to see if I could get the exact pitch of the sounds ye make when we’re making love and you’re just about to … er… to … it’s something between a growl and a really deep hum.”

  Her mouth opened slightly, and her eyes slightly more. The tip of her tongue was a dark, dark red.

  “I think it’s the F below middle C,” he concluded hurriedly. She blinked.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not.” He picked up his half-full glass and tilted it gently, so the rim touched her lip. She closed her eyes and drank, slowly. He smoothed her hair behind her ear, his finger moving slowly down the length of her neck, watching her throat move as she swallowed, moved his fingertip along the strong arch of her collarbone.

  “You’re getting warmer,” she whispered, not opening her eyes. “The second law of thermodynamics.”

  “What’s that?” he said, his voice dropping, too.

  “The entropy of an isolated system that is not in equilibrium tends to increase, reaching a maximum at equilibrium.”

  “Oh, aye?”

  “Mmm-hmm. That’s why a warm body loses heat to a colder one, until they’re the same temperature.”

  “I knew there had to be a reason why that happened.” All sounds from upstairs had ceased, and his voice sounded loud, even though he was whispering.

  Her eyes opened suddenly, an inch from his, and her black-currant breath on his cheek was as warm as his skin. The bottle hit the parlor carpet with a soft thud.

  “Want to try for E flat?”

  HENRY

  June 14, 1777

  HE HAD FORBIDDEN Dottie to accompany him. He wasn’t sure what he might find. In the event, though, he was surprised. The address to which he had been directed was in a modest street in Germantown, but the house was commodious and well kept, though not large.

  He knocked at the door and was greeted by a pleasant-faced young African woman in neat calico, whose eyes widened at sight of him. He had thought best not to wear his uniform, though there were men in British uniform here and there in the streets—paroled prisoners, perhaps, or soldiers bearing official communications. Instead, he had put on a good suit of bottle-green, with his best waistcoat, this being gold China silk, embroidered with a number of fanciful butterflies. He smiled, and the woman smiled in turn and put a hand over her mouth to hide it.

  “May I help you, sir?”