Free The Burning Glass by Lillian Stewart Carl Page A

headlights feeling their way, the engine noise
blending with the rush of wind in the trees.
    With a shiver, Jean looked back into the
room. Forlorn antiquity got her every time, and with its peeling
paint, chipped mantelpieces, collapsing plaster, cracked paneling,
and cobwebbed cupboards, Ferniebank was certainly forlorn. To say
nothing of fascinating, layered with the debris of lives beyond
counting.
    As Michael had said, if it weren’t for people
like Ciara, these old buildings would fall to ruins. If she and
Keith could be trusted not to throw the historical baby out with
the trendy bath water, her conference and healing center would mean
new life in the old vessel. Jean gritted her teeth and sent a
feeler of appreciation toward the Mystic Scotland van, which would
be past Kelso by now. But then, why should it even be past
Stanelaw? Ciara and her minion were probably staying in the
village, now that Ferniebank was at last the scene of the
action.
    “What are you thinking?” Alasdair stood so
close beside her she could feel the prickle of his energy field.
His grave profile was pale against the gloom outside the beam of
light. He wasn’t asking what she thought, but what she felt.
    She focused, pulling her thoughts around her
like a cloak. Warily, so nothing would leap out at her, she eased a
psychic toe into her sixth sense. Heavy. Sad. Cold. Uneasy .
The chill teased the back of her neck, crushing her shoulders with
the inert weight of earth or clay. “The prime of our land are
cauld in the clay,” went the old lament, “The Flowers of the
Forest.”
    “This is the room that’s haunted,” she
whispered, stating, not asking.
    “Oh aye.”
    “Quiet as the grave, still as death . . . I
can’t see or hear a thing.”
    “Nor can I. But I can feel it, a dirty great
stone in the pit of my stomach. An icicle in my gut.”
    The gelid pressure seemed to lift, and the
fine hair on the nape of her neck settled back into place. Jean
swung around to face Alasdair. In the backspatter of light from the
flashlight, his regular, even ordinary, features looked as though
they’d been hacked out of whinstone and assembled with an unusually
tenacious intellect. “Is that how it feels to you?” she asked.
    “It’s different for you, is it?”
    “It’s like a wet blanket, a literal one. And
a sensation on the back of my neck like invisible cobwebs.” She
glanced over her shoulder, but nothing was there that hadn’t been
there a moment earlier. Ghosts weren’t dangerous. They were only
recordings of emotions long past. It was the emotions themselves
that hurt.
    “Reality can be slippy at best,” murmured
Alasdair. “But losing it entirely can be a bit . . .”
    “Disconcerting,” Jean finished, opting for a
milder word than horrifying . “I was wondering back in June
if the two of us together made a sort of critical mass when it
comes to ghost-spotting.”
    “Aye, I was thinking that as well. No joy
this night, though—the ghost’s not walking.”
    “Or no sorrow, depending. Somebody has to
have seen this ghost to know it’s a her. Did Wallace sense her, do
you think? Or did he pick up the story from the leaflet, too?”
    “It was Wallace who wrote the leaflet, as
well as illustrating it. Like as not he heard the tale locally.
It’s the sort of tale you’re always hearing locally, fancies made
up after the fact.”
    “If he did hear it locally, he didn’t fancy
it up any. The account in the leaflet’s pretty bald—Isabel Sinclair
died trying to elope. Do you know the details?”
    “A longer version’s in the P and S files,
written in full nineteenth-century verbiage by Gerald Rutherford.”
Alasdair lowered the flashlight, creating a bright puddle at their
feet like a spotlight on a stage, the actors waiting in the wings
for their cues. “Isabel was the daughter of the Sinclair who was
laird of Ferniebank during the time of Mary Stuart. A time of grand
confusion and conflict, with religious issues