All the children stood in silence, as she had expected, but now she had warmed the blood of the coy Brian. His hand shot up among the bowed heads of those too scared to make eye contact with Dr. Gould.
“Yes, Brian,” she smiled, “what is your question?”
“Miss Nina, who gave you that torc?” he asked. Miss April looked at confused as the other children at his question.
“That what?” Miss April asked with an annoyed wince.
Nina turned to her and pulled her shirt collar aside somewhat, revealing the bronze Celtic torc she wore around her neck. “This is a torc.”
A raised eyebrow and rounded lips from Miss April paid evidence to the teacher’s unawareness of the term. Miss April tried not to look dumb, but admittedly, her blank stare was a strong contender to the contrary.
“Oh,” she replied.
“I got this torc from an expedition I was on with a few people,” Nina humored the boy with the personal detail. After all, she reckoned, he had earned it. “We unearthed it near a Celtic burial site.”
“That is illegal, isn’t it, Miss?” one of the girls asked, looking shocked.
Nina laughed. “No, we acquired a government sanctioned permit to dig up the site, because they were going to build a road there and we did not want the relics to be destroyed when they dug up the ground for the road.”
“So, you just took it?” the girl asked.
“No, it was given to me by the collector who paid for it all, my dear,” Nina answered, playing with the smooth, lightly engraved neck ring under her slender fingertips, “for my assistance in the excavation.”
A collective gasp of intrigue coursed through the group of children. Brian just smiled. Miss April thought it was a good way to end the lesson, while the class was excited about something.
“Now listen up, you lot,” she announced in her shrieking tone. “Remember to bring your own relics to class tomorrow, alright?”
The class roared in approval as they followed the two teachers out of the chapel towards Dumbarton Way past the south front. They headed for the small bus waiting at the south gate entrance of the Glasgow University grounds.
“What exactly do they have to bring tomorrow? I hope they do not elect to steal grandma’s silver tea set or dad’s antique musket,” Nina jested.
Miss April uttered one of her shrill giggles. “No, my God, no. They can bring anything old, something with some history, you see. It can be a ring, an old bayonet, does not matter. Of course, history is first period tomorrow, so we do not have to be concerned about the children testing out old weapons on each other. I will keep the items on display,” she used gestured inverted commas to affirm her intent of safekeeping, “until the home bell.”
“Good,” Nina sighed in relief. “Just, you know, being Glasgow and all.”
“Oh, Glasgow’s reputation for the rough and tumble is exaggerated,” Miss April defended the city. “I have been here a while and only had one mugging so far.”
“Really? I have scars from my college days hanging out in Glasgow,” Nina chuckled.
Miss April grinned. “I wish I could be like you, Dr. Gould. You are so fearless. Going on all those expeditions and almost dying so many times… you… don’t you get nightmares?”
“Of course I did!” Nina told her. “But it is par for the course. Ultimately, the pay-off must reward the risk, and I must say, it really does. Of course, I do not see it so positively while I am in peril.”
“Still, you have survived being almost sacrificed to Baphomet that time, not to mention the people you have to run from,” Miss April said. She gave a shiver and groaned. “I do not think I would ever survive what you have, mentally or physically.”
Something the teacher said stuck in Nina’s mind, although she was not sure why. She frowned, “How do you mean, the people I have run from?”
Miss April shrugged, keeping her eyes away from Nina. “Just from the books I have read about the excursions you were involved with, I have deduced that the people who threaten your safety are usually the same… fabric.”
“Ah,” Nina replied. She had no other retort to the vague assumption of the teacher, but she did not like it one bit. It felt as if the skinny Miss April knew something she was not disclosing, but Nina had no tactic to dig for more right now. The teacher’s statement, referring to the Order of the Black Sun, coincided with the other peculiar thing Nina saw that first day at the school.
‘The children knocking on the desk in applause,’ she thought to herself. ‘Never before had I seen something like that from children, let alone Scottish children. A distinctly German thing, to knock on the desk, coming from a bunch of pre-teens in a UK school?’
As the bus pulled away from the university to deliver students and faculty to Gracewill Primary, Nina felt that familiar twinge. To her, the boy with his engaging stare and interesting obsession was the only good spark in the impending darkness of Miss April’s secretive web.
7
Heirloom
Glasgow was draped in a golden glow as the morning traffic began to plague the pre-dawn peace. For once, the cloudy atmosphere was absent, a portent of the strange day to come. Commuters crowded the city from all sides and Nina felt as if she had not slept in days, even after her full ten hours of dead sleep since she clocked in at 8pm. Stepping out of the shower, she wrapped her wet body in a loose thick towel and left a trail of wet footprints across the thick carpet of her room. With a world-weary sigh, she reached for a dented pack of Marlboros and pulled a fag from it.
The click of her lighter offered a great deal of relief, knowing what came next. Nina suckled gently at the end of the cigarette, closing her eyes to savor the rush. “Oh God, yes,” she whispered as she exhaled long into the sunrays that penetrated the window. “Nicotine orgasm.” Smoke bordered the shape of the light falling across Nina’s gleaming shoulders and face, her eyes rapidly darting under their lids.
When she opened them, she was disappointed to see the foggy pollution and the rushing cars populate the entire view from her vantage. She scoffed and pinched the fag between her lips as she poured water into the coffee maker, waiting for the gurgling choke of the mechanism. The morning cold was beginning to sting her moist skin and chill the soles of her feet.
“Fuck,” she complained, ripping off the towel and throwing it over her shoulders, tightly pulling it to her body. Trying to keep warm, Nina was shaking her body like a Sixties cage dancer under the towel, waiting for the toaster. Eventually it took too long and she headed back to her bed and pulled her suitcase from underneath.
“Just the sweater. Just the sweater and the Eskimo boots,” she muttered, watching her cigarette bounce as she spoke. While Nina was salvaging what body heat she had left, she thought about the Brian boy from the museum trip and how he knew about things like torcs. It made her smile. She sucked on the last bit of the fag before crushing it in the ashtray. Today was Miss April’s designated day of show-and-tell for History Week and after the young Brian mentioned the Celtic piece of jewelry, Nina was eager to see what he would bring to class.
Much as Miss April and her creepy manner bothered her, there were only two days left of the easy money week in Glasgow and Nina was beginning to see the end of the tunnel, behind which was a trip back home to Oban. She direly needed a month off, just to close off the year’s insanity.
With her fag exhausted, she got dressed and had two slices of toast with black coffee. Hopefully the sun would warm her once she was outside, but for now not even the hot coffee could help her stop shaking. Perhaps there was more to Nina’s tremors than just the cold. Usually, this happened when she was subconsciously agitated or felt apprehensive for whatever reason, but Nina chose to blame the cold.