“Sit down,” Lasher said to her. Her breakfast was being prepared now, he had heard her tread above when she stepped out of bed.
“I’m sure,” she said grimly.
“Go on,” he said to the old man.
The old man was champing at the bit and picked up apparently where he’d left off, that the archaeological project had been funded for ninety years, through both wars, by American money. Some family in the States interested in the Clan of Donnelaith.
But only in recent years had real progress been made. When they’d realized the Cathedral dated back to 1228, they’d asked the family in the States for more money. To their amazement the old trust was beefed up, and a whole gang from Edinburgh was now here, had been for twenty years, gathering stones that had been scattered and finding the entire foundations of not only the church itself but a monastery and an older village, possibly from the 700s. The time of the Venerable Bede, he explained, some sort of cult place. He didn’t know the details.
“We always knew there was Donnelaith, you see,” said the old man. “But the Earls had died out in the great fire of 1689, and after that there wasn’t much of a town at all, and by the turn of the century nothing. When the archaeological project began, my father came to build this inn. Nice gentleman from the United States leased him this property.”
“Who was this?” he asked in utter bafflement.
“Julien Mayfair, it’s the Julien Mayfair Trust,” said the old man. “But you really ought to talk to the young chaps from the project. They are a well-behaved and serious lot, these students, they stop the tourists from picking up stones and what-not and wandering off with them.
“And speaking of stones, there is the old circle, you know, and for a long time that was the place where they did most of their work. They say it’s as old as Stonehenge, but the Cathedral is the real discovery. Talk to the chaps.”
“Julien Mayfair,” he repeated, staring at the old man. He looked helpless, bewildered, on guard. And as if the words meant nothing. “Julien…”
By afternoon, they had wined and dined several of the students, and the entire picture emerged, as well as packets of old pamphlets printed from time to time to sell to the public to raise money.
The present Mayfair Trust was handled out of New York, and the founding family was most generous.
The eldest on the project, a blond Englishwoman, with bobbed hair and a cheerful face, rather chunky in her tweed coat and leather boots, didn’t mind at all answering their questions. She’d been working here since 1970. She’d applied twice for more funds and found the family entirely cooperative.
Yes, one of the family had come to visit once. A Lauren Mayfair, rather stiff. “You would have never known she was American.” The old woman thought that was hilarious. “But she didn’t care for it here, you know. She took some pictures from the family and was off at once to London. I remember her saying she was going on to Rome. She loved Italy. I don’t suppose most people love both climes-the damp Highlands and sunny Italy.”
“Italy,” he whispered. “Sunny Italy.” His eyes were filling with tears. Hastily he wiped them on his napkin. The woman had never noticed. She was talking on and on.
“But what do you know about the Cathedral?” he asked. For the first time in all his brief life, as Rowan had known it, he looked tired to her. He looked almost frail. He’d wiped his eyes several times more with a handkerchief, saying it was an “allergy” and not tears, but she could see he was cracking.
“That’s just it, we’ve been wrong about it before, we don’t put forth many theories. Definitely the grand Gothic structure was built around 1228, same time as Elgin, but it incorporated an earlier church, one possibly which contained stained-glass windows. And the monastery was Cistercian, at least for a while. Then it became Franciscan.”
He was staring at her.
“There seems to have been a cathedral school, perhaps even a library. Oh, God only knows what we are going to find. Yesterday we found a new graveyard. You have to realize people have been carrying off stones from this place for centuries. We’ve only just unearthed the ruins of the thirteenth-century south transept and a chapel we didn’t know was there, containing a burial chamber. This definitely involves a saint, but we cannot identify him. His effigy is carved on top of the tomb. We’re debating. Dare we open it? Dare we seek to find something in there?”
He said nothing. The stillness around them was suddenly unnerving; Rowan was afraid he would cry out, do something utterly wild, draw attention to them. She tried to remind herself that it would be perfectly fine if this happened. She felt sleepy, heavy with milk. The old woman talked on and on about the castle, about the warring of the clans in these parts, the endless battles and slaughter.
“What destroyed the Cathedral?” Rowan asked. The lack of chronology was disturbing to her. She wanted a chart in her mind.
He glared at her angrily, as if she’d no right to speak.
“I’m not sure,” said the old woman. “But I have a hunch. There was some sort of clan war.”
“Wrong,” he said softly. “Look deeper. It was the Protestants, the iconoclasts.”
She clapped her hands almost with glee. “Oh, you must tell me what makes you think so.” She went on a tirade about the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, the burning of witches that had gone on for a century or more right to the very end of the history of Donnelaith, cruel cruel burnings.
He sat dazed.
“I’ll bet you’re absolutely right. It was John Knox and his reformers! Donnelaith had remained, right up to the bloody fire, a powerful Catholic stronghold. Not even wicked Henry the Eighth could suppress Donnelaith.”
The woman was now repeating herself, and going on at length about how she hated the political and religious forces which destroyed art and buildings. “All of that magnificent stained glass, imagine!”
“Yes, beautiful glass.”
But he had received all she had to give.
As evening fell they went out again. He had been silent, not hungry, not disposed for love, and not letting her out of his sight. He walked ahead of her, all the way across the grassy plain until they came again to the Cathedral. Much of the excavations of the south transept was sheltered by a great makeshift wooden roof, and locked doors. He broke the glass on a window, and unlocked a door and went inside. They were standing in the ruins of a chapel. The students had been rebuilding the wall. Much earth had been dug away from one central tomb, with the figure of a man carved on the top of it-almost ghostly now that it was so worn away. He stood staring down at it, and then up at what they had restored of the windows. In a rage he began to beat on the wooden walls.
“Stop, they’ll come,” she cried. But then she lapsed back, thinking, Let them come. Let them put him in jail for a madman. He saw the cunning in her eyes, the hate which for a moment she could not disguise.
When they got back to the inn, he started listening to his own tapes, then turning them off, rummaging through his pages. “Julien, Julien, Julien Mayfair,” he said.
“You don’t remember him, do you?”
“What?”
“You don’t remember any of it-who Julien was or Mary Beth or Deborah, or Suzanne. You’ve been forgetting all along. Do you remember Suzanne?”
He stared at her, blanched and in a silent fury.
“You don’t remember,” she taunted again. “You started to forget in Paris. Now you don’t know who they
He approached her, and sank down on his knees in front of her. He seemed wildly excited, the rage going into some rampant and acceptable enthusiasm.
“I don’t know who
Past midnight, he’d wakened her in the act of rape, and when it was done, he wanted to go, to get away before anyone came to look for them. “These Mayfairs, they must be very clever people.”
She laughed bitterly.
“And what sort of monster are you?” she asked. “You’re nothing I made. I know that now. I’m not Mary Shelley!”
He stopped the car and dragged her out into the high grass and struck her again and again. He struck her so
