Read Online The Avalon Chanter by Lillian Stewart Carl - Free Book Online Page A

chubby, cheery, and
mustachioed male twin. In fact, the pub seemed to be the male
principle to the B&B’s female, perfumed with potatoes instead
of potpourri, equipped with all the traditional comforts but on the
shabby rather than the sparkling side.
    The clientele seemed similarly easygoing,
probably because they hadn’t yet heard the news from the
priory—although a couple of heads were bent together in sotto voce
speculation about something. Maybe they were discussing football
scores or the spring bird count.
    Jean recognized two faces. Lance fidgeted on
a stool not far from the beer taps, gazing balefully at Tara, who
occupied a tiny table across the room. She already had one empty
pint glass in front of her and was starting in on another, to the
accompaniment of what looked like a shepherd’s pie. She must have
fled here instead of eating her tea at home, assuming she called
Gow House home.
    Jean turned her eye to her husband, who drank
deeply of his dark ale. She could trace its path from his throat to
his stomach and through his nervous system not by a slackening in
his expression—he never slacked—but by a mellowing. His features,
like his body, were economical, compact, reserved. Even his hair
was cut short and plain, resembling amber waves of grain touched by
frost. Only his eyes revealed what nuclear fires burned behind the
lead shielding of his manner. Or, rather, she knew what his eyes
revealed because she’d learned the hard way how to read them and
their freezes and thaws.
    She would never have believed that a year
after her divorce she’d remarry, going from twenty years in
purgatory to this state of grace. Alasdair would never have
believed that years after the bitter disillusion of his first
marriage, he would now find himself with another wife who—well,
Jean wasn’t perpendicular to reality, she simply had her own slant
on it.
    Maggie had never married after the tragedy of
her youth. Was she lonely? Was she self-sufficient?
    What about Crawford? Was there a Mrs.
Crawford over in Bamburgh, covering a dinner plate and tucking it
away? Were there smaller Crawfords needing help with their
homework?
    Jean thought of Crawford sitting in the
darkened cloister—the word that was the root of “claustrophobia.” A
cloistered nun or monk might feel closed-in, never mind soaring
hymns and transcendental ceremonies. A monk or nun on Farnaby, or
Lindisfarne, or distant Iona, might feel particularly enclosed,
looking out at a wide horizon but having no way of crossing it. And
yet a remote island was at the same time part of the world and not
part of the world, a portal between planes of being.
    How did Maggie feel? She hadn’t chosen
Farnaby. Was she trapped by love and duty, watching her horizons
creep closer and closer and her ambitions molder away? What about
Tara, breaking out of Gow House as fast as she could tonight?
    Alasdair turned his blue eyes, now warm as a
summer sky, toward her. “Tuppence for your thoughts, lass.”
    “ Isn’t the expression, ‘a penny for
your thoughts’?”
    “ Yours are aye worth
double.”
    “ I’ll remind you of that the next time
they leap from A to G and you want me to map out B, C, D, E, and
F.”
    He toasted her with his glass.
    Raising hers in turn, first toward him and
then to her lips, Jean filled him in on what Rebecca had
said—automatic writing, different sorts of sixth senses, lingering
sensory waves from the past or parallel universes or something.
What if Elaine had been communing in some fashion with the spirit
Jean and Alasdair themselves sensed in the priory?
    “ In my experience,” said Alasdair, “the
dead are not shy about appearing. Communicating? No.”
    “ I’ve only encountered one that even
seemed to be aware of my presence.” Jean let that memory fade into
the vivid here-and-now. “What I’m wondering is why that reporter
from wherever he was from—not from one of the sober papers or
magazines, I bet, not with that