The Avalon Chanter by Lillian Stewart Carl Read Free Book Online Page A

a name tag and the
tidy binding of her red hair, Jean deduced she served as a nurse or
home health aide.
    Maggie and Tara stepped over the threshold
and the door shut with a solid thunk, cutting off the sound of a
clock striking.
    “ What a shame,” Jean told Alasdair.
“According to the date on that gravestone, Elaine’s seventy-five.
These days that’s not much past middle-aged.”
    “ That’s as may be, but it’s not making
you and me teenagers. Time we were feeding ourselves and settling
in for the night.” Alasdair’s large, strong hand on the small of
her back urged her on.
    One last backwards glance showed her
the sign on the garden gate that she’d missed when they’d sped past
earlier. Gow House . Wat must
have named his home for Neil Gow, the legendary fiddler.
    The school building was the newest one
on the road, by a century at least, built in the uninspired style
of the nineteen-eighties that seemed to Jean’s eye to be no style
at all. Its sign read Gallowglass School of
Traditional Music . What sort of traditional music
wasn’t specified, but then, the school was located in Northumbria,
home of multiple mixed and matched traditions. Gallowglass had made
its reputation adding new world beats to old British songs, in a
genre Jean thought of as Country Eastern. A shame the school was no
longer open year-round, but Wat’s injuries and subsequent death had
deprived it of a permanent artist-in-residence.
    There, too, windows gleamed. Through them
came the sound of fiddles, an accomplished one carrying the tune, a
bouncy jig, several others squeaking along behind. The leader had
to be Hugh Munro, punctilious as usual about training up the
younger generation in the way in which it should go. They’d either
catch up with him at the B&B or at the pub.
    In a silence less companionable than mutually
puzzled, Jean and Alasdair walked around the hairpin turn and onto
the main street of Farnaby St. Mary. Gulls squawked overhead,
sounding a little like the student violins. Somewhere in the
darkness beyond the pebbled beach the sea murmured, and the horizon
rose and fell gently in the last glimmer of daylight.
    They could keep on going, Jean thought. It
wasn’t their case. They had no battles to fight here, other than
academic interest in the chapel and the constant gnawing of
curiosity. But short of commandeering one of the kayaks on the
breakwater and heading for Lindisfarne, where the causeway was
open, they were stranded.
    The sign reading The Queen’s Arms creaked in the wind. According
to a small sign high on the pub’s side wall, the cobblestoned
alleyway running alongside was named Cuddy’s Close. Cuddy, also
known as Cuthbert, Lindisfarne’s other saint. Supposedly his body
was still intact in its shrine in Durham Cathedral.
    They could safely assume, Jean told herself,
that the body in St. Genevieve’s chantry chapel was not that of
Cuthbert. That was about all they could assume.
    The reddish gray walls of the house on
the corner indicated that it, like so many other buildings in
Farnaby St. Mary, had been built with stones robbed from the
priory. Its front window displayed a placard reading, Angle’s Rest B&B . Four stars. “Here we are,” Alasdair
said, and opened the door for Jean.
     
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    “ Hello?” Alasdair called.
    “ There you are!” A pleasantly
upholstered woman popped out of a side door into the hallway,
bringing with her a scent of baking bread that made Jean go weak in
the knees. “Lance turned up with your cases ever so long ago, I
thought you’d changed your minds and moved into the students’
hostel down the way.”
    “ We were delayed,” Jean evaded, and
went on to introduce herself and her spousal unit.
    The woman’s handshake was brisk, firm, and
slightly floury. “Oh, sorry.” She wiped her hands on the front of
her apron, succeeding only in rearranging the dusting of flour
already there. “Penelope Fleming. Pen, that is. We’ve got no