Read Online The Burning Glass by Lillian Stewart Carl - Free Book Online Page B

set
designers.” Floors was a vast Georgian country house, remodeled and
romanticized by the dictates of Victorian fashion into a fairytale
castle, its roof bristling with turrets, pinnacles, and cupolas.
Jean visualized carriages manned by white-wigged footmen decanting
bejeweled guests into Floors’s marble halls. Here, at Ferniebank,
she imagined reivers in steel bonnets riding down out of the mist
like avenging—not angels. Demons.
    Setting one of his large, comforting hands in
the small of her back, Alasdair guided her through the lighter
doorway into a square vaulted room. Each of its three windows
contained a gleaming slice of the twilight. This room, now, had a
sort of derelict charm.
    If her sense of direction wasn’t too badly
skewed, the wall that was covered on this side with paneling so old
it looked moth-eaten was the one that on the other side was neatly
whitewashed stone, the line of demarcation between castle and flat.
The paneling was interrupted by a probably eighteenth-century
Georgian door, its frame lopsided. In the narrow slices of space
between door and frame Jean saw nothing but charcoal-gray stone. On
the apartment side, then, the doorway had been filled in and
painted over. There was something—not necessarily eerie, but
definitely evocative, perhaps even symbolic—about a blocked
doorway.
    But then, in this part of the world home
renovation didn’t mean a garage conversion. It meant generation
after generation remodeling for convenience, safety, and fashion.
She started breathing through her nose again and discovered that
she was getting used to the smell. “This is the Laigh Hall, right?
The lower hall, where the flunkeys and the petitioners awaited the
lord’s pleasure. I bet the flat used to be the kitchens, although
that fireplace in the living room is too small to have been the
main one.”
    “Right you are. The High Hall’s just this
way.” Alasdair waved her on toward a spiral staircase leading
upwards. She placed each foot with care on the misshapen treads. If
she slipped he would break her fall, but breaking him wasn’t what
she had in mind.
    “Ferniebank’s a right ordinary border keep,”
Alasdair said to her back, “built of whinstone rubble with
sandstone dressings and an unusually tenacious lime mortar. The
place might once have been related to the royal stronghold at
Roxburgh.”
    “Which went into a decline after James III’s
favorite cannon blew up and took him with it,” said Jean. “Sort of
the story of Scotland in microcosm, hoist with its own petard.”
    Behind her Alasdair made a sound between a
snort and a chuckle. “We’ve got a second-, perhaps third-rank
castle here. The action was always somewhere else, ’til now, at the
least.”
    They emerged into a large, tall room, this
one with a wooden floor that made each footstep resound like a
drumbeat. In the sudden light of another bare bulb, Jean saw
stained plaster ceilings, windows gleaming from deep embrasures,
paneling revealing the ghosts of old paintings, and the empty maw
of a fireplace big enough to set up an office for Keith Bell,
complete with drafting table and water cooler. The place was
growing on her, she decided, and not like mold.
    A rustling noise, almost like whispering,
seemed to emanate from the stone itself. But her sixth sense, the
ghost detector, didn’t react. “Bats? Birds? Rats?”
    “All of the above.” Alasdair shot a glance
upwards, but even he didn’t have x-ray vision. His spook sensor
must not be sounding an alarm, either. “The well might date to
Roman times or before, the original chapel to the ninth century,
perhaps. The castle’s right modern, dates to the fourteenth
century, built by Robert the Bruce’s henchman, William Saint Clair
of Rosslyn and Orkney. The William Saint Clair who built Rosslyn
Chapel in the fifteenth century built a new chapel here as well,
obliged to maintain his status with the neighbors.”
    “And the hospice? Does that go back to