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PAYING

THE

PIPER

Sharyn McCrumb

Copyright © 1988 by Sharyn McCrumb

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-91970

ISBN 0-345-34518-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Ariel and Spencer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the many experts who were generous with their time and knowledge in helping with the research for this book. Among the most helpful were Lyle Browning, archaeologist for the state of Virginia; Dr. Robert Carman of the Virginia Tech Department of Microbiology; the Cadies—Colin MacPhail and Robin Mitchell—of Edinburgh, who allowed me to use their tour of the Murder Walks of Edinburgh in the narrative; Erich Neumann, for help with information on bagpipes; Dr. Gavin Faulkner, for letting himself be dragged all over Scotland while I researched this book; and Dr. Zach Agioutantis, for his help with computers.

 

CHAPTER 1

CAMERON

I loaned her eight guidebooks of Scotland, and all the maps that I had, but she only looked at the castles and the pictures of the mountains, bare against the sky.

"Not like our mountains in Virginia,'' she said. "We have trees. But it's close enough. I guess my MacPherson ancestors must have felt almost at home when they settled there."

They call themselves Scots, these ninth-generation descendants of a MacDonald or a Stewart, and they've no idea what or where the family was in the ''old country," but they feel some sort of kinship with Scotland that is half history and half Robert Burns. It isn't the country I've come from, though I can't make them see that.

Elizabeth knows more history than I do, but she takes it all personally. Her eyes flash when she talks about the Jacobite Cause, but she mispronounces most of the battles— "Cul-tow-den," she says. I tell her how to say them correctly, but I can't tell her much about them. It was a long time

ago , and nobody minds anymore. I'm a marine biologist, not a historian.

She tells me I don't look Scottish, whatever that means. Lots of people have brown hair and brown eyes. What would she know about it? She's never been there. "I'm a Celt!" she says, the way someone else might say, "I'm a duchess," though I think it's nothing much to be proud of, the way they're carrying on in Belfast. She has the look of them, though, with that mass of black hair and the clear blue eyes of a bomb-throwing Irish saint. She looks at me sometimes, and she knows things I'd never dream of telling her.

She claims no interest in genealogy because she doesn't haunt courthouses or write away for shipping records, but the yearning is there; only she goes about it differently. ''Fash't,'' she'll say. "Do you have that word? Or clabbered, or red the room? Sometimes I’ve heard them, from my grandmother perhaps, and she'll smile as if I’ve given her something, and say, "From mine, too." She takes me to bluegrass conceits and watches to see if I recognize a song. Often I do, but I don't know if it's because the tune has Celtic roots or if it's because they play country music on Radio Forth. I grew up listening to Jim Reeves and Ernest Tubb as much as she did, but she won't realize that. She thinks that because you can see Edinburgh Castle from our upstairs window at home, somehow we're neighbors of Mary, Queen of Scots, instead of residents of the modern world.

I don't know what she's looking for in the phrases or the mountains or the faces in my photo album, and when she says she loves me, I wonder if she sees me at all.

* * *

I don't remember telling her that she could go along when I went back to Scotland to do my summer research. It's as if one moment I was recommending things she might like to see if she ever visited there, and the next, I was writing to Edinburgh University to see if there were any archaeological digs in the Highlands near the island where I'd be doing my seal research. Elizabeth is doing graduate work in forensic anthropology; she studies the bones of something to determine what it was like when it was alive; perhaps this is also her approach to Scottish culture.

There weren't many digs to choose from, and none that were related to her field of study, but one of the replies mentioned that Denny Allan was fielding the requests to join the expedition. A Denny Allan had been in my class at Fettes.

I explained to Elizabeth that the dig offered no pay, no university credit, and was completely out of her field. Still, she insisted that I write to Denny Allan and get her accepted as one of the crew. I pointed out that my own research was solitary, isolated, and time-consuming. Perhaps I could see her on weekends. That was all. She said that weekends were better than nothing. I said I hoped she knew what she was in for. The group would be camping out on the site: no modern conveniences, and an uninhabited island with no bridge or ferry service to the mainland and no town nearby. "Don't be fooled by the term summer, either,'' I warned her. ‘‘Scotland is cold by your standards, and you may not enjoy tent-dwelling in a rainy climate."

My lament fell on deaf ears, all of it. She is so enchanted at the thought of being "in the Highlands," as she puts it, that all practical considerations are dismissed out of hand. So I wrote to Denny (it turned out he was my school chum,

after all) and got her a place on the Marchand expedition, studying Celtic standing stones on an island near Skye. I am afraid that she will be disappointed, but she can't say she wasn't told. When I suggested that she might see more museums and castles if she signed up for a bus tour and came over with a group, she wept and accused me of calling her a "tourist," which she said she was not. The MacPherson ancestors, you see. Elizabeth thinks she is "going home."

Dear Cousin Geoffrey,

Yes, I am finally making a trip to Europe, even if I have to "rob graves" (as you so colorfully put it) to get to go.

As a matter of fact, the archaeological expedition I'll be working with is not concerned with unearthing bodies. We're studying megalithic monuments in the Scottish Highlands, in order to determine whether the Celts used Pythagorean geometry in constructing their stone circles. I'll admit that this is not particularly relevant to my graduate work in forensic anthropology (body snatching, to you), but it was the only archaeological dig we could find near where Cameron is doing his summer research. It should work out very nicely: he'll be studying seals, and I'll be measuring standing stones, and we'll get to see each other on weekends.

We're landing in London, so I should get to do some sightseeing on the way to Scotland. Thank you for your travel suggestions, but I don't think I care to visit the alley where Jack the Ripper left his victims, or the eighteenth-century sex club in High Wycombe. Just the usual touristy sites like Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon will suit me fine.

I doubt if I will have either the time or the money to visit you during your vacation in the Greek islands, where you will no doubt be viewed as Dionysus with MasterCard. And if you persist in this quest for the perfect tan, you are going to resemble the cover of a Bible by the time you are fifty!