Around five, a fresh strong breeze came up, and the haze began to dissipate. As though this was a signal waking Callahan from his dream, the archaeologist straightened, stood a moment looking down at something, then nodded.
“Well, it may be an ancient site,” he said, climbing out of his trench and groaning as he leaned to and fro, stretching his back. “The structure’s not, though. Likely built sometime in the last couple of hundred years, though whoever built it used much older stones in the construction. Probably brought them from somewhere else, though some may be from an earlier structure built on the spot.” He smiled at Roger. “Folk are thrifty in the Highlands; last week I saw a barn with an ancient Pictish stone used in the foundation and a floor made with bricks from a demolished public lavatory in Dornoch.”
Callahan looked out to the west, shading his eyes, where the haze now hung low over the distant shore.
“High places,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They always chose the high places, the old ones. Whether it was a fort or a place of worship, they always went up.”
“The old ones?” Roger asked, and felt a brief prickle of the hair on his nape. “Which old ones?”
Callahan laughed, shaking his head.
“Don’t know. Picts, maybe—all we know about them is the bits of stonework they left here and there—or the folk who came before them. Sometimes you see a bit of something that you know was made—or at least placed—by men, but can’t fit it into a known culture. The megaliths, for instance—the standing stones. Nobody knows who set those up or what for.”
“Don’t they,” Roger murmured. “Can you tell what sort of ancient site this was? For war or worship, I mean?”
Callahan shook his head.
“Not from what’s apparent on the surface, no. Maybe if we excavated the underlying site—but to be honest, I don’t see anything that would make anyone really want to do that. There are hundreds of sites like this on high places, all through the British Isles and Brittany, too—old Celtic, many of them, Iron Age, lots much older.” He picked up the battered saint’s head, stroking it with a sort of affection.
“This lady’s much more recent; maybe the thirteenth, fourteenth century. Maybe the family’s patron saint, handed down over the years.” He gave the head a brief, unself-conscious kiss and handed it gently to Roger.
“For what it’s worth, though—and this isn’t scientific, just what I think myself, having seen more than a few such places—if the modern structure was a chapel, then the ancient site beneath it was likely a place of worship, too. Folk in the Highlands are set in their ways. They may build a new barn every two or three hundred years—but chances are it’ll be right where the last one stood.”
Roger laughed.
“True enough. Our barn’s still the original one—built in the early 1700s, along with the house. But I found the stones of an earlier croft buried when I dug up the stable floor to put in a new drain.”
“The 1700s? Well, you’ll not be needing a new roof for at least another hundred years, then.”
It was nearly six but still full daylight. The haze had vanished in that mysterious way it sometimes did, and a pale sun had come out. Roger traced a small cross with his thumb on the statue’s forehead and set the head gently in the niche that seemed made for it. They’d finished, but neither man made a move to leave just yet. There was a sense of comfort in each other’s company, a sharing of the spell of the high place.
Down below, he saw Rob Cameron’s battered truck parked in the dooryard and Rob himself sitting on the back stoop, Mandy, Jem, and Jem’s friends leaning in on either side of him, evidently absorbed in the pages he held. What the devil was he doing?
“Is that singing I hear?” Callahan, who had been looking off to the north, turned half round, and as he did so, Roger heard it, too. Faint and sweet, no more than a thread of sound, but enough to pick up the tune of “Crimond.”
The strength of the stab of jealousy that went through him took his breath, and he felt his throat close as though some strong hand choked him.
Jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire.
He closed his eyes for an instant, breathing slow and deep, and with a little effort, dredged up the first bit of that quotation: Love is strong as death.
He felt the choking sensation begin to ease and reason return. Of course Rob Cameron could sing; he was in the men’s choir. Only make sense that if he saw the rudimentary musical settings Roger had noted for some of the old songs, he’d try to sing them. And kids—especially his kids—were attracted to music.
“Have you known Rob for long, then?” he asked, and was pleased to hear his voice sound normal.
“Oh, Rob?” Callahan considered. “Fifteen years, maybe… No, I tell a lie, more like twenty. He came along as a volunteer on a dig I had going on Shapinsay—that’s one of the Orkneys—and he wasn’t but a lad then, in his late teens, maybe.” He gave Roger a mild, shrewd look. “Why?”
Roger shrugged.
“He works with my wife, for the Hydro Board. I don’t know him much myself. Only met him recently, in lodge.”
“Ah.” Callahan watched the scene below for a moment, silent, then said, not looking at Roger, “He was married, to a French girl. Wife divorced him a couple of years ago, took their son back to France. He’s not been happy.”
“Ah.” That explained Rob’s attachment to his widowed sister’s family, then, and his enjoyment of Jem and Mandy’s company. He breathed once more, freely, and the small flame of jealousy flickered out.
As though this brief exchange had put a period to the day, they picked up the leavings from their lunch and Callahan’s rucksack and came down the hill, companionable in silence.
“WHAT’S THIS?” There were two wineglasses set on the counter. “Are we celebrating something?”
“We are,” Bree said firmly. “The children going to bed, for one thing.”
“Oh, bad, were they?” He felt a small twinge of guilt—not very severe— for having spent the afternoon in the high, cool peace of the ruined chapel with Callahan rather than chivvying small mad things out of the kailyard.
“Just really energetic.” She cast a suspicious glance toward the door to the hall, through which the muted roar of a television came from the big front parlor. “I hope they’ll be too worn out to spend the night jumping on the beds. They’ve had enough pizza to put six grown men into a coma for a week.”
He laughed at that—he’d eaten most of a full-sized pepperoni himself and was beginning to feel comfortably stuporous.
“What else?”
“Oh, what else are we celebrating?” She gave him a cat-in-the-cream look. “Well, as for me …”
“Yes?” he said, obliging.
“I’ve passed the provisional employment period; now I’m permanent, and they can’t get rid of me, even if I wear perfume to work. And you,” she added, reaching into the drawer and placing an envelope in front of him, “are formally invited by the school board to do a reprise of your Gàidhlig triumph at five different schools next month!”
He felt a moment’s shock, then a warm flood of something he couldn’t quite identify, and realized with a greater shock that he was blushing.
“Really?”
“You don’t think I’d tease you about something like that?” Not waiting for an answer, she poured the wine, purple-rich and aromatic, and handed him a glass. He clinked it ceremoniously against her own.
“Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us?”
“Damned few,” she replied in broad Scots, “and they’re all deid.”
THERE WAS A certain amount of crashing upstairs after the children were sent to bed, but a brief appearance by Roger in the persona of Heavy Father put a stop to that, and the slumber party simmered down into storytelling and stifled giggles.
“Are they telling dirty jokes?” Bree asked, when he came back down.
“Very likely. Ought I make Mandy come down, do you think?”
She shook her head.
“She’s probably asleep already. And if not, the sort of jokes nine-year-old boys tell won’t warp her. She isn’t old enough to remember the punch lines.”
“That’s true.” Roger took up his refilled glass and sipped, the wine soft on his tongue and dense with the scents of black currant and black tea. “How old was Jem when he finally learned to tell jokes? You remember how he got the form of jokes but didn’t really understand the idea of content?”
“What’s the difference between a … a … a button and a sock?” she mimicked, catching Jem’s breathless excitement to a T. “A… BUFFALO! HAHAHAHAHA!”
Roger burst out laughing.
“Why are you laughing?” she demanded. Her eyes were growing heavy-lidded, and her lips were stained dark.
“Must be the way you tell it,” he said, and lifted his glass to her. “Cheers.”
“Slàinte.”
He closed his eyes, breathing the wine as much as drinking it. He was beginning to have the pleasant illusion that he could feel the heat of his wife’s body, though she sat a few feet away. She seemed to emanate warmth, in slow, pulsing waves.
“What do they call it, how you find distant stars?”
“A telescope,” she said. “You can’t be drunk on half a bottle of wine, good as it is.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. There’s a term for it—heat signature? Does that sound right?”
She closed one eye, considering, then shrugged.
“Maybe. Why?”
“You’ve got one.”
She looked down at herself, squinting.
“Nope. Two. Definitely two.”
He wasn’t quite drunk, and neither was she, but whatever they were was a lot of fun.
“A heat signature,” he said, and, reaching out, took hold of her hand. It was markedly warmer than his, and he was positive he could feel the heat of her fingers throb slowly, increasing and diminishing with her pulse. “I could pick you out of a crowd blindfolded; you glow in the dark.”
She put aside her glass and slid out of her chair, coming to a stop kneeling between his knees, her body not quite touching his. She did glow. If he closed his eyes, he could just about see it through the white shirt she wore.
He tipped up his glass and drained it.
“Great wine. Where did ye get it?”
“I didn’t. Rob brought it—a thank-you, he said, for letting him copy the songs.”
“Nice guy,” he said generously. At the moment, he actually thought so.
Brianna reached for the wine bottle and poured the last of it into Roger’s glass. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at him owl-eyed, the empty bottle clutched to her chest.
“Hey. You owe me.”
“Big-time,” he assured her gravely, making her giggle.
“No,” she said, recovering. “You said if I brought my hard hat home, you’d tell me what you were doing with that champagne bottle. All that hooting, I mean.”