Ashes to Ashes by Lillian Stewart Carl Read Free Book Online

“Flemish tapestries,” said Michael with a flourish of his notebook. “Excellent condition. Portraits by Raeburn and Lawrence. A Rembrandt cartoon. A Meissen clock.”
    Rebecca went from object to object, crooning appreciation. This was wonderful, everything she’d anticipated and more. “Graham of Claverhouse,” she said, identifying one portrait.
    “Died of old age in London in 1707,” Michael returned.
    She shot him a scornful look. “He was killed in the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, as you well know.”
    “Mm,” said Michael, aggressively noncommittal. “Who’s that?”
    Rebecca eyed an illuminated manuscript page. “Saint Margaret, I think. She of the chapel in Edinburgh Castle. Right?”
    “Right enough.”
    The other small bedroom on that floor had evidently belonged to James. An aluminum walker and other bits and pieces of sickroom equipment lay jumbled beside a Sheraton wardrobe. Heck of a place to be stuck when you’re old and sick, Rebecca thought, up three flights of stairs. The man must have loved Dun Iain to have resisted moving to the nursing home Dorothy had mentioned.
    Rebecca reached for the doors of the wardrobe. “Careful,” said Michael brightly. “If you go about keekin’ into cupboards, you’re askin’ for things to fall oot on your head.”
    She opened the door. Nothing fell on her but the stale scent of lavender, underlain by a slight acrid reek. The wardrobe was crammed with long dresses with puffed sleeves, hatboxes, prim high-button boots, and lacy garments shrouded in yellowed tissue paper. “Elspeth’s things, still here?”
    “They’re from the right time,” replied Michael. “She died in 1901.”
    Rebecca gave the cradle a quick rock as they went on to the next room. By its door was a pen and ink drawing. “Dunstaffnage Castle,” she said. “Built by the MacDougals and appropriated by the Campbells.”
    “Where Mary Hamilton was imprisoned in 1571.”
    “Where Flora MacDonald was imprisoned in 1746. Will you stop that?”
    “Stop what?” Michael eyed the drawing. “Poor daft Flora. If she’d handed Bonnie Prince Charlie over to the authorities, we’d have been spared a lot of romantic twaddle.”
    “Spoken like a true Campbell,” she teased.
    “So the Campbells had the gumption to see which way the wind was blowin’, and sided wi’ the Hanoverians.”
    “And were richly rewarded for doing so.”
    “It always comes to money in the end,” he stated, with the finality of a period at the end of a sentence.
    She wasn’t about to dispute that. She waved airily at yet another portrait. “There’s Prince Charles Edward himself. Take it up with him.” And she walked on, leaving Michael to make a sardonic bow before the handsome if arrogant features of the Young Pretender.
    Rebecca felt as if she were inside a kaleidoscope, bits of Scottish history from Robert Bruce to Robert Burns, from Saint Columba to Harry Lauder, shifting and sliding before her eyes. From the sublime… . A Covenanter’s Bible. A chain mail gauntlet. A broken bit of statuary from Scone. Sir Walter Scott’s inkwell. Scrapbooks filled with old postcards, neatly labeled in what Rebecca had already come to recognize as James’s copperplate hand.
    To the ridiculous. Jelly jars lined the windowsills, filled with scraggly bits of ivy. Candy wrappers were neatly spindled on old nails. Stacks of lurid detective novels teetered atop cabinets.
    On the wall of the fifth floor corridor was a portrait of John Forbes himself. The old tycoon’s eyes were expressionless onyx marbles, his mouth a thin, suspicious fissure above an outthrust chin. Lush white sideburns and moustache could not soften a face dehydrated by a lifetime of resentment. On a little table below the portrait was a leather-bound copy of Man of Iron , by James Ramsey Forbes, its gilded embellishments cracked and tarnished. “Did James mean the title to be ironic?” Rebecca wondered aloud. “Iron rusts. Carnegie was the