Ashes to Ashes by Lillian Stewart Carl Read Free Book Online Page B

window frame and looked out. “He has the Earl of Montrose’s heart.”
    “What?” Rebecca creaked down the room and looked out the other side of the turret. Below the window the driveway streaked the lawn like a line on a map and disappeared into the trees. She felt as if she were in the crow’s nest of a ship sailing a sea of maple leaves.
    “Charles II sent Montrose to Scotland in 1650… .”
    “I know that. But his heart?”
    Michael cocked an eyebrow— squeamish? “There’s a receipt for it among James’s lists, signed by some retired brigadier in Swansea, of all places.”
    “Well,” said Rebecca gamely, “people in the Middle Ages used to venerate the body parts of holy men and women.”
    “Montrose was hardly a saint. Well kent, aye.”
    “Like as not some soldier there beneath the scaffold simply helped himself to a souvenir.”
    They considered each other for a moment. Michael essayed, “Rumor has it that Elizabeth Curle… ”
    “Mary’s lady-in-waiting who commissioned the portrait downstairs.”
    “… rescued Queen Mary’s severed head and took it to Antwerp.”
    “Wouldn’t John have loved that? He could’ve carried it around with him like Walter Raleigh’s wife carried her husband’s head in a velvet bag.” Rebecca shivered, a cold draft sliding through the window and tightening her shoulders. “I’ll tell you one thing Forbes doesn’t have: Mary’s death mask. I saw it at Lennoxlove, outside Edinburgh, last summer with Ray.” The name clunked as heavily as the nocturnal footsteps into the silence.
    “The bloke in your photograph?”
    If she’d peeked into Michael’s room, he’d peeked into hers. “Yes,” she answered. Interesting how her mouth didn’t add, “my fiance.” Michael gazed out the window, Mary and Montrose much more relevant to him than Ray Kocurek. Rebecca rushed on. “Not that the death mask looks much like the effigy downstairs, but I guess that was idealized.”
    “Supposedly the one was modeled on the other.”
    She crossed her arms. “A sarcophagus in your front hall, even a half-size one. John must’ve been one of the great nineteenth-century eccentrics.”
    “Not so much as you’d think. The rich can afford to be slightly daft. In fact, they’re expected to be. John was quite mindful of his social status. I’ll show you some of the newspaper cuttin’s when we go back down.”
    There was a distinct draft along the floor as well, wrapping around Rebecca’s ankles like a cold purr of a reptilian cat. She hugged herself. “If I had any money, I’d be glad to act crazy and amuse the peasants.”
    “They say money can’t buy happiness, although I’d like to give it a try.” Michael straightened, his fingers rippling the pages in his notebook. The tiny whirring sound complemented the rustling of the trees. “Speakin’ of which, there’s a particularly interestin’ series of cuttin’s about Elspeth’s death. I doot there’s more to that than ever made the dailies. The verdict of the inquest was suppressed for a time, you know.”
    “No, I don’t know. The book just said that she died.”
    “Oh aye,” exclaimed Michael. “Something you dinna ken?” He paused for effect. “She jumped or fell from this very window.”
    The cold in Rebecca’s shoulders wriggled down her spine to splash against the cold in her ankles. “Suicide?”
    “Apparently. But John would’ve preferred bein’ up for murder, I wager, than admittin’ his wife killed herself rather than live wi’ him.”
    “It wasn’t murder, though?”
    “No one else was in this room when she fell, or there might’ve been some suspicion.”
    “The young woman married to the old man,” said Rebecca. “A classic story. Poor Elspeth— that was the only way out of her trap.”
    “They laid her out on her own bed, there in front of Mary’s portrait. After she was gone,” he concluded wistfully, “there were nae more parties.”
    Rebecca remembered how Michael had