The Avalon Chanter Read online

  What reviewers are saying about The Avalon Chanter:

  Carl’s suspenseful, atmospheric sixth mystery featuring historian and journalist Jean Fairbairn and her husband, retired police detective Alasdair Cameron. Cozy fans with an interest in British history will be satisfied.

  —Publishers Weekly

  Could Farnaby Island be the Avalon of Arthurian legend? Farnaby lies off the coast of Northumberland, near the better-known holy isle of Lindisfarne. First Elaine Lauder and now her daughter Maggie, inhabitants of Farnaby, have tried to prove that it is Avalon. Maggie has announced the opening of a tomb she’s convinced will cause a sensation. It does but not the one she had imagined . . . full of enjoyable twists.

  —Kirkus Reviews

  …full of fascinating Arthurian connections . . . Carl's fondness for the mythology of the British Isles, a dash of ghost sighting, and the region will work for armchair travel enthusiasts.

  —Library Journal

  The novel is beautifully written and whether you believe the ethereal singing of ancient Priory nuns is real or mere wisps from the fog-shrouded sea only enhances the brooding atmosphere of danger that pervades the pages of this novel. The family complications and old passions are complicated and carefully worked out to logical conclusions so that in the end, the resolution to mystery and murder is solidly satisfying. An excellent novel that comes strongly recommended.

  —Carl Brookins, Buried Under Books

  1THE AVALON CHANTER

  Book Seven of the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron Mystery Series

  Lillian Stewart Carl

  Smashwords edition

  Copyright 2014 by Lillian Stewart Carl

  This book is available in print at most on-line retailers

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  DEDICATION

  For all the Scottish musicians who have enriched my life, starting—but not ending—with Brian McNeill, John Taylor, and Ed Miller.

  “Do you play with a band?”

  “I play with Gallowglass from time to time.”

  “They’re good,” Jean temporized . . .

  The Secret Portrait, book one of the Fairbairn/Cameron series.

  Chapter One

  Jean Fairbairn gazed past the edge of the map, at the gray-green hills gliding anonymously outside the car window. “Dang! I wanted to get there by the time she opens the grave!”

  Her husband favored her with a glance from his keen blue eyes. “Professor Lauder and her chantry chapel, eh? What’s she on about this time?”

  “She hasn’t said. I mean, the purpose of a press release is to tease and promote, not answer ques— What do you mean, this time? Are you thinking of that old court case?”

  “The woman was on trial for murder.”

  “Well, yeah. Big scandal and all that, but she was acquitted. Even an old cop like you—former cop, not old, I mean—even a meticulous guardian of truth, justice, and the British way like you has to cut her some slack. It happened twenty years ago and she’s been a model citizen ever since.”

  Alasdair slowed the car. His hint of a frown, Jean estimated, commented on their location, not their conversation.

  “As for the chantry chapel and the mysterious tomb,” she went on, “I think I know where Lauder’s going, considering her earlier work and who her mother is. Or was, poor thing. You know how much I love a reality–mythology smackdown.”

  “That I do,” he said with a sigh. “I’m wishing we knew where we were going just now.” He peered over the weathered stone wall hemming in the strip of blacktop that passed for a road. The hills weren’t so much rolling as twitching, with sudden screes and narrow gullies sprouting bristly shrubs, lumpy grass, and the occasional sheep. And the ruins of farms long gone.

  Britain was one of the most thickly populated countries in the world, and yet there were areas you’d swear hadn’t seen a human being since Eric Bloodaxe was a pup. “When I called Miranda I told her we were taking the scenic route,” Jean rationalized. “Country roads, Roman and Dark Age sites, Flodden Field and the flower of Scotland a’ wede awa’—I’ll do some sort of ‘Legends of the Scottish Borders’ article for Great Scot if the chapel, grave, thing, turns out to be a bust.”

  “If it’s a no-go? Not when it’s a no-go?” He sped up again.

  “Oh ye of little faith in the follies of an archaeologist on the trail of the next big discovery. You don’t get funding opening the grave of some nameless peasant.”

  All he replied was, “Next time we’re hiring a car with GPS. Or bringing along a guide.”

  “I could try again with the GPS on one of our phones, but . . .” Pulling out her handheld supplemental brain, Jean switched it on, saw that it was still registering a lack of contact with its own kind, and switched it off again. “Well, we can actually see the sun today, and since it’s going down behind us, we’re heading east. If we keep going, we’ll either meet the main highway or tip over into the North Sea. Then we’ll know where we are.”

  Alasdair muttered something about English roads—or perhaps about England, period.

  “We’re only a few miles into Northumbria, a long way north of Hadrian’s Wall. It’s barely England. You can stow the rampant lion of Scotland in the trunk of the car. The boot of the car.”

  Stopping at a crossroad, Alasdair considered both directions, said “Right!”, and turned left.

  Jean folded the map—no, not that way. She tried again. Not that way either. “GPS,” she said, half to herself. “Global Positioning System. How about Green Pastures Strange? That has a Biblical sound to it.”

  “Gratuitous Passenger Speech,” stated Alasdair.

  “Yes, dear,” she replied. Funny how his remark provoked an indulgent smile, not resentment. They were settling into married bliss, a little give, a little take, a trim of the sails here, a solid push-back there. They’d learned from their first marriages. They were determined to have learned from them.

  Jean forced the map into a bulging rectangle, tossed it into the back seat, and once again inspected the hills outside the window. They were smoothing out, calming down. There lay an inhabited farm, and beyond it, rising from the horizon, the massive rotating blades of several wind turbines. In the tender light of the April afternoon they looked like alien spaceships.

  “Well then. Ancroft. Civilization of a sort.” Alasdair slowed to a decorous crawl through the photogenic village, but not slow enough for Jean to fully appreciate the church, part house of worship, part fortress.

  “Historical physics,” she wrote aloud. “Two independent entities can’t occupy the same territory at the same time. Roman, Celt, Briton, and Pict, Angle, Saxon, and Dane, Scotsman and Englishman, sometimes fighting with, sometimes against each other. Dark and bloody ground, the Borders, like all borders, physical or metaphorical. Like the borderlands of perception where ghosts walk.”

  “Yes, dear,” Alasdair said with an indulgent smile of his own.

  Between a break in the hills glinted the sea. The road traced a tight curve, like a thread of interlace design on the Lindisfarne Gospels, and came to a stop at the wide tarmac of the A1. Traffic sped by, seeming almost as alien as the wind farm.

  Jean winced as Alasdair swung into a right turn, across traffic—over a year in the UK and her instincts still defaulted to the Americ
an side of the road. Then she widened her eyes to watch for signs. Within moments she spotted one indicating the village of Beal and the causeway crossing to Lindisfarne, the Holy Island itself. Waiting cars were backed up almost to the highway.

  “Here’s me,” said Alasdair as they drove on by, “worried about catching the tide. If it’s low enough for driving the causeway to Lindisfarne, it’s too low for the ferry crossing to Farnaby Island.”

  “Oh. You can tell I was born and raised a long way away from anything having tides. That never occurred to me.”

  “I’m hoping a Plan B’s occurred to you. If the ferry’s not this side of the crossing, there’s no point our calling for it. We’ll be sleeping the night on the mainland, and going across with Michael and Rebecca tomorrow.”

  “Dang,” Jean said again. “First we miss the grand opening—not that your average dig is run with military precision—and now we might miss Hugh playing tonight.”

  “We’re always hearing Hugh playing. The walls between our flat and his aren’t so thick as all that.”

  “You know what I mean. Hugh in session with the students at the Gallowglass School, since he’s this week’s artist-in-residence. A shame Gallowglass the group never could get going again after the accident. You remember Hugh talking about that, how their van slid off the road in a snowstorm, crashed into a gully, and injured them all. Wat Lauder never really recovered, and their comeback was a bust.”

  “Losing him’s what drove the last nail into their coffin. Intending no pun.”

  “Poor Maggie Lauder, losing her father, and her mother so ill. I hope she’s found what she thinks she’s found at the chapel, although I doubt if it’s actually there to be found . . . Oh! There’s the sign. Farnaby Island. Ferry.”

  Alasdair guided the car onto a strip of part blacktop, part gravel. It jounced over a railroad crossing and between several high shrubs to emerge in a parking area pitted with mud puddles. Six or eight vehicles sat there, no two pointed quite the same direction. Jean had eyes only for the small ferry just pulling into the dock. “Yes! Plan A is officially under way.”

  Wasting no words on the obvious, Alasdair parked the car, leaped out, opened the boot and extracted their bags. They were heading for the ferry, their suitcases jolting behind them, by the time it scraped against the pier’s weedy stones.

  Above the smooth lower flanks of the boat, a metal panel walled off a flat deck like a mini-aircraft carrier’s. As the rumble of the engine changed tones, the rusty metal sheet creaked, gaped, and then with a mighty squeal and clang unfolded onto the dock.

  You could only bring a vehicle to Farnaby Island with special permission. Jean had been anticipating stepping off a curb or two and not looking either way, let alone both, an indulgence that would be suicidal in Edinburgh.

  But no one brought any vehicles away from Farnaby, either—not one rolled off the ferry. Several men and women surged over the now almost-horizontal metal panel, up the dock, and into the parking lot. Jean detected not a smile among them, even at finding their paths clear to happy hour at the closest pub. The sea was calm, only small waves tripping and falling onto the beach beyond the pier, so they couldn’t be seasick. Or not all of them could be seasick, although one or two might have a stomach as delicate as that of Jean’s friend and professional partner at Great Scot, Miranda Capaldi, who would get queasy in a hot tub.

  Every one of the tight-lipped departing passengers held some sort of electronic slave—a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet. One man whose prison pallor, colorless hair, and sagging physique indicated long years of hunching over electronic slaves used his iPad to photograph Lindisfarne and its shadow, Farnaby. Jean sensed her brethren and sistren from the fourth estate.

  So did Alasdair. “Your lot,” he said from the corner of his mouth.

  “Yep.” She homed in on the photo-taking man, the only one standing still. “How did the opening of the tomb in the chantry chapel go? Any big revelations or no more than another medieval nobleperson?”

  “Ah, Loony Lauder and her dog and pony show, with no dogs and no ponies. No worms, come to that.”

  “The grave was empty?”

  “Who’s to know? She cancelled the entire do. Instead, she sat us all down in the church and tried to buy us off with tea, scones, and a lecture on some Dark Age cavalry bloke. Dead loss, save for the scones.” His blunt fingertips tapped the screen. “This lot, in church? Surprised we weren’t struck by lightning.”

  “Some Dark Age cavalry bloke? As in, Arthur, King of the Britons? You know, Camelot. Lancelot. Guinevere. Not that any of them actually existed, although according to Professor Lauder’s mother . . .”

  “Jean!” Alasdair called. “The ferry’s away!”

  “Farnaby,” said the reporter. “Loony Lauder. Better you than me, luv. Much better.” He strolled toward the parked cars, so focused on his tablet Jean figured he only knew she was female from her voice.

  She hustled on down to the dock, telling herself the man must work for a tabloid. He was probably texting the office in a plea not for hazard but for boredom pay—no dead body and any living ones having nothing to do with celebrities such as, say, Princess Kate, as many Americans called her. But if not for the honorary “Duchess of Cambridge,” her name would be Princess William, counterintuitive as that sounded. A princess by marriage.

  Past a battered, out-of-style phone booth—a direct connection to ferry HQ on the island, Jean suspected—and a garishly red life preserver like a huge cherry, well, Life Saver, and she reached the end of the metal gangplank. Alasdair left their bags standing on the deck of the boat and stepped back to seize her elbow and steady her up the slope of the surface.

  “Thanks,” she said, the final sibilant concealed by the squeal of the rising gangplank.

  Chapter Two

  The gangplank thudded home. Engines roared. A tall muscular young man wearing the universal uniform of T-shirt, jacket, and jeans leaped from empty dock to deserted deck. He coiled the mooring ropes, then stepped forward, hand extended. “That’ll be five pound each.”

  Alasdair reached into his pocket before Jean could bring her mini-backpack around. “Locals ride for free, do they?” he asked.

  “We’ve got us a subsidy from Westminster, being the only public access to the island.” The man crammed the bills into a pocket, adding with a grin so broad every white tooth gleamed with good humor, “Never you mind, Jock, you’ll get your five quid worth of scenery.”

  Alasdair’s neutral expression crackled with frost. So close to the Border, and he was already hearing Scots jokes.

  An older, rather shrunken version of the young man emerged from a superstructure that appeared to be bridge, crew quarters, and passenger waiting room all in one. With his jacket and peaked cap, to say nothing of the gray stubble on the lower half of his weather-beaten face, he had to be both captain and father.

  “Mind your manners, lad,” he said, and to Jean and Alasdair, “I’m Clyde Eccleston. This here’s my boy, Lance. His sense of humor’s a bit over the top.”

  “Lance” was short for Lancelot, Jean assumed, an appropriate name for someone probably born and bred in sight of Bamburgh Castle.

  Lance’s crest fell, if only slightly. “Sorry. No offense.”

  “None taken,” lied Alasdair, and, thawing, “I’m Alasdair Cameron.”

  “Jean Fairbairn. We were supposed to attend Professor Lauder’s press conference and . . .” She stopped before she said, dog and pony show, although in academia dogs and ponies were likely to perform amazing tricks. “Well, I hear she called it off.”

  “She opened the grave and found nothing?” asked Alasdair.

  “No,” Eccleston Senior replied before Jean could. “She cancelled the do before it started. No reason I could see, but then, wasn’t my party, was it? I’m only ever carting folk back and forth, music students, twitchers after counting their birds, wildfowlers after shooting them, divers, even the odd tourist, though never so many as go out to Lind
isfarne.”

  “I’ve been to Lindisfarne a couple of times, but never to Farnaby.” She didn’t add that if Maggie Lauder’s hypothesis held up, Clyde and Lance could see a surge in business. Although what Jean often saw were metaphorical castles in the air crashing down, undermined by reality. She’d been responsible for more than a little undermining herself.

  Sidling back toward his command center, Clyde added over his shoulder, “The Lauder clan’s good folk, never mind being newcomers to Farnaby. Wat and Elaine came in as newlyweds, fifty years ago. Maggie was born here, bonniest lass you’ve ever seen, and now—forty if she’s a day.”

  “That clock keeps right on ticking,” Jean murmured.

  “They’ve all gone traveling, mind you, but they’ve always come back. Somewhat peculiar, the womenfolk are, poking about things all dead and gone. But the music’s good, and who isn’t peculiar, in their own way?”

  Jean grinned at that and glanced at Alasdair, who shrugged agreement. Clyde seemed happy to cut Maggie Lauder slack. The reporter in the car park and his colleagues would not.

  The boat lurched, hitting the slow swell of the sea. Simultaneously Alasdair and Jean spun toward and down onto a bench beside the railing. Lance, unsurprisingly much more sure of foot, ambled away across the expanse of deck. His tanned face and blue eyes beneath a mane of flaxen hair made him look like a throwback to his Viking forebears. All he needed was a horned helmet and berserker’s sword.

  “The Ecclestons have likely lived on Farnaby for generations,” Alasdair said.

  “No surprise Clyde called the Lauders newcomers.”