Roger nodded, trying to adjust to the idea of elderly Mrs. Graham, that extremely proper person, engaging in pagan rites and dancing round stone circles in the dawn. All he could remember of Druid ceremonies himself was that some of them involved burning sacrificial victims in wicker cages, which seemed still more unlikely behavior for a Scottish Presbyterian lady of advanced years.
"There's a circle of standing stones on top of a hill, fairly nearby. So we went up there before dawn to, well, to spy on them," she continued, shrugging apologetically. "You know what scholars are like; no conscience at all when it comes to their own field, let alone a sense of social delicacy." Roger winced slightly at this, but nodded in wry agreement.
"And there they were," she said. "Mrs. Graham included, all wearing bedsheets, chanting things and dancing in the midst of the stone circle. Frank was fascinated," she added, with a smile. "And it was impressive, even to me."
She paused for a moment, eyeing Roger rather speculatively.
"I'd heard that Mrs. Graham had passed away a few years ago. But I wonder…do you know if she had any family? I believe membership in such groups is often hereditary; maybe there's a daughter or granddaughter who could tell me a bit."
"Well," Roger said slowly. "There is a granddaughter—Fiona's her name, Fiona Graham. In fact, she came to help out here at the manse after her grandmother died; the Reverend was really too elderly to be left all on his own."
If anything could displace his vision of Mrs. Graham dancing in a bedsheet, it was the thought of nineteen-year-old Fiona as a guardian of ancient mystic knowledge, but Roger rallied gamely and went on.
"She isn't here just now, I'm afraid. I could ask her for you, though."
Claire waved a slender hand in dismissal. "Don't trouble yourself. Another time will do. We've taken up too much of your time already."
To Roger's dismay, she set down her empty glass on the small table between the chairs and Brianna added her own full one with what looked like alacrity. He noticed that Brianna Randall bit her nails. This small evidence of imperfection gave him the nerve to take the next step. She intrigued him, and he didn't want her to go, with no assurance that he would see her again.
"Speaking of stone circles," he said quickly. "I believe I know the one you mentioned. It's quite scenic, and not too far from town." He smiled directly at Brianna Randall, registering automatically the fact that she had three small freckles high on one cheekbone. "I thought perhaps I'd start on this project with a trip down to Broch Tuarach. It's in the same direction as the stone circle, so maybe…aaagh!"
With a sudden jerk of her bulky handbag, Claire Randall had bumped both whisky glasses off the table, showering Roger's lap and thighs with single malt whisky and quite a lot of soda.
"I'm terribly sorry," she apologized, obviously flustered. She bent and began picking up pieces of shattered crystal, despite Roger's half-coherent attempts to stop her.
Brianna, coming to assist with a handful of linen napkins seized from the sideboard, was saying "Really, Mother, how they ever let you do surgery, I don't know. You're just not safe with anything smaller than a bread-box. Look, you've got his shoes soaked with whisky!" She knelt on the floor, and began busily mopping up spilled Scotch and fragments of crystal. "And his pants, too."
Whipping a fresh napkin from the stack over her arm, she industriously polished Roger's toes, her red mane floating deliriously around his knees. Her head was rising, as she peered at his thighs, dabbing energetically at damp spots on the corduroy. Roger closed his eyes and thought frantically of terrible car crashes on the motorway and tax forms for the Inland Revenue and the Blob from Outer Space—anything that might stop him disgracing himself utterly as Brianna Randall's warm breath misted softly through the wet fabric of his trousers.
"Er, maybe you'd like to do the rest yourself?" The voice came from somewhere around the level of his nose, and he opened his eyes to find a pair of deep blue eyes facing him above a wide grin. He rather weakly took the napkin she was offering him, breathing as though he had just been chased by a train.
Lowering his head to scrub at his trousers, he caught sight of Claire Randall watching him with an expression of mingled sympathy and amusement. There was nothing else visible in her expression; nothing of that flash he thought he'd seen in her eyes just before the catastrophe. Flustered as he was, it was probably his imagination, he thought. For why on earth should she have done it on purpose?
"Since when are you interested in Druids, Mama?" Brianna seemed disposed to find something hilarious in the idea; I had noticed her biting the insides of her cheeks while I was chatting with Roger Wakefield, and the grin she had been hiding then was now plastered across her face. "You going to get your own bedsheet and join up?"
"Bound to be more entertaining than hospital staff meetings every Thursday," I said. "Bit drafty, though." She hooted with laughter, startling two chickadees off the walk in front of us.
"No," I said, switching to seriousness. "It isn't the Druid ladies I'm after, so much. There's someone I used to know in Scotland that I wanted to find, if I can. I haven't an address for her—I haven't been in touch with her for more than twenty years—but she had an interest in odd things like that: witchcraft, old beliefs, folklore. All that sort of thing. She once lived near here; I thought if she was still here, she might be involved with a group like that."
"What's her name?"
I shook my head, grabbing at the loosened clip as it slid from my curls. It slipped through my fingers and bounced into the deep grass along the walk.
"Damn!" I said, stooping for it. My fingers were unsteady as I groped through the dense stalks, and I had trouble picking up the clip, slippery with moisture from the wet grass. The thought of Geillis Duncan tended to unnerve me, even now.
"I don't know," I said, brushing the curls back off my flushed face. "I mean—it's been such a long time, I'm sure she'd have a different name by now. She was widowed; she might have married again, or be using her maiden name."
"Oh." Brianna lost interest in the topic, and walked along in silence for a little. Suddenly she said, "What did you think of Roger Wakefield, Mama?"
I glanced at her; her cheeks were pink, but it might be from the spring wind.
"He seems a very nice young man," I said carefully. "He's certainly intelligent; he's one of the youngest professors at Oxford." The intelligence I had known about; I wondered whether he had any imagination. So often scholarly types didn't. But imagination would be helpful.
"He's got the grooviest eyes," Brianna said, dreamily ignoring the question of his brain. "Aren't they the greenest you've ever seen?"
"Yes, they're very striking," I agreed. "They've always been like that; I remember noticing them when I first met him as a child."
Brianna looked down at me, frowning.
"Yes, Mother, really! Did you have to say ‘My, how you've grown?' when he answered the door? How embarrassing!"
I laughed.
"Well, when you've last seen someone hovering round your navel, and suddenly you find yourself looking up his nose," I defended myself, "you can't help remarking the difference."
"Mother!" But she fizzed with laughter.
"He has a very nice bottom, too," I remarked, just to keep her going. "I noticed when he bent over to get the whisky."
"Mo-THERRR! They'll hear you!"
We were nearly at the bus stop. There were two or three women and an elderly gentleman in tweeds standing by the sign; they turned to stare at us as we came up.
"Is this the place for the Loch-side Tours bus?" I asked, scanning the bewildering array of notices and advertisements posted on the signboard.
"Och, aye," one of the ladies said kindly. "The bus will be comin' along in ten minutes or so." She scanned Brianna, so clearly American in blue jeans and white windbreaker. The final patriotic note was added by the flushed face, red with suppressed laughter. "You'll be going to see Loch Ness? Your first time, is it?"
I smiled at her. "I sailed down the loch with my husband twenty-odd years ago, but this is my daughter's first trip to Scotland."
"Oh, is it?" This attracted the attention of the other ladies and they crowded around, suddenly friendly, offering advice and asking questions until the big yellow bus came chugging round the corner.
Brianna paused before climbing the steps, admiring the picturesque drawing of green serpentine loops, undulating through a blue-paint lake, edged with black pines.
"This will be fun," she said, laughing. "Think we'll see the monster?"
"You never know," I said.
Roger spent the rest of the day in a state of abstraction, wandering absently from one task to another. The books to be packed for donation to the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities lay spilling out of their carton, the Reverend's ancient flatbed lorry sat in the drive with its bonnet up, halfway through a motor check, and a cup of tea sat half-drunk and milk-scummed at his elbow as he gazed blankly out at the falling rain of early evening.
What he should do, he knew, was get at the job of dismantling the heart of the Reverend's study. Not the books; massive as that job was, it was only a matter of deciding which to keep himself, and which should be dispatched to the SPA or the Reverend's old college library. No, sooner or later he would have to tackle the enormous desk, which had papers filling each huge drawer to the brim and protruding from its dozens of pigeonholes. And he'd have to take down and dispose of all of the miscellany decorating the cork wall that filled one side of the room; a task to daunt the stoutest heart.