Paying the Piper Read online

  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!

  I'll send you a postcard from Edinburgh (of Burke and Hare, if I can find one), but after that I'll be incommunicado. The dig is on a tiny island with no inhabitants and no mail service. Perhaps we can get together for the family Thanksgiving ordeal and inflict slide shows on one another. Until then—

  As ever, Elizabeth

  TRAVELER'S DIARY

  You can't sleep on a DC-10. Not this one, anyway, with stewardesses rolling drinks carts up the aisles and making movie announcements and hawking duty-free goods. It's like trying to fly to Britain in a K-Mart. I'm hunched up in my window seat, trying to deci
de which half of my body I want circulation in and where the Band-Aid sized pillow would do the most good.

  "I feel like a squirrel in a coconut!" I hissed to Cameron.

  "No. Sorry," he replied. "They only serve those on Caribbean flights."

  British humor. I'm still not accustomed to it, even after all these months of knowing Cameron. He seems to be able to take a phrase and turn it inside out, so that I have to think for a minute before I understand the point of the joke. During the year that he has been at the university as a visiting professor, he has been trying to absorb American culture; I, in turn, have spent the year learning him, as if he were a foreign language. Having ancestors who came from Scotland two centuries ago is certainly no help in figuring out a specimen from the present! For the longest time I thought that dear was a term of affection, until I began to notice the circumstances in which he used it. "That restaurant is fine, dear," when we had to wait an hour for a table. "Next street, I think, dear," when I hadn't noticed the sign that said one way.

  Dear means idiot.

  I still don't know what he would use as a term of affection. It would probably take implements of torture to find out. He said he liked an outfit I was wearing once. And he told me that I was the only woman he could really discuss his work with. Two compliments in a year-long relationship. Whoever said that the British are not demonstrative had a gift for understatement. The only real indication that he likes me is his assumption that I'll always be there, always be free to go out, always want to hear about his experiences at the biology lab. That, and the fact that he eats the potato chips off my plate in restaurants, a sure sign of intimacy. There's more difference between Brits and Americans than a few vocabulary changes—flat for apartment, and that sort of thing. I don't know how he thinks. Does he simply not show affection, or does he also not feel it?

  I wonder what else I'm going to learn about British-American culture while I'm over here.

  PEOPLE WHO PRIDE THEMSELVES ON THEIR BRITISH PREP SCHOOL MANNERS SHOULD NOT READ OTHER PEOPLE'S TRAVEL DIARIES WHILE THEY ARE TRYING TO WRITE!

  Finally got to sleep (from sheer exhaustion) and woke up to sunlight—at a time my body knew was 1:00 a.m.

  The cumulus clouds below us look like white outline embroidery seamed on a white quilt. What is that called? Candlewicking? My mother would know. I wonder when we'll see Ireland and if it will really look emerald-green down below. . . .

  I must have dozed off. A change in the noise of the airplane engines woke me up, and I looked out the window to see a patchwork of golden fields and green meadows, with little stone houses set all among them. We are much nearer the ground now. Must be coming into Heathrow.

  I stand corrected. Gatwick. We are coming into Gat-wick. And when I find out what silly git means, you're going to be in trouble, Doctor Dawson, sir.

  Caveat, Britannia! Here we come.

  "Hmmm," said Elizabeth MacPherson, "the glove compartment in this car is awfully small."

  "Glove box." Cameron Dawson's correction was automatic. "Small?"

  "Yes. I was thinking of crawling into it." She risked a glance out the windshield. "Everybody here is driving on the wrong side of the road, and they must be doing eighty at least.''

  Cameron smiled. "High speeds are allowed on the Ml. You'll be used to it by the time we get to Scotland."

  If we get to Scotland, Elizabeth thought, but she tried to look reassured. "It's quite amazing how quickly you got used to British driving again," she remarked. After that one little incident with the truck as we were leaving the car rental lot, she added to herself.

  "I’ve only been away for a year," he reminded her. "Look at that car ahead of us. The red one. That's a Vauxhall VX 4/90. You can hear those things two streets away."

  "That's nice," Elizabeth said absently. She was scanning the horizon for castles or picturesque villages with cobbled streets, but so far the drive on the motorway from Gatwick had been mostly trees and pastures, looking remarkably like the Virginia landscape they had just left.

  "And that white one is a TR6. My cousin had one of those. On a cold day we used to have to stick a fan in the engine to get it started."

  "Look!" cried Elizabeth, seeing a flash of purple on the roadside. "Heather!"

  Cameron did not spare a glance out the window. "Rose-bay willow herb, I expect," he told her. "Heather doesn't grow on roadways in Hampshire, dear."

  "It's very pretty, though."

  "It's a weed. We had to slave to keep them out of the garden. My father says that during the war willow herb was the first plant to grow in the ruins of a bomb site."

  "How lovely!" Elizabeth cried. "Like a condolence card from Nature."

  Cameron refused to be drawn into paeans of nature. "That green car is a Moggie Thou—a Morris 1000," he informed her. "My first car was one of those."

  Elizabeth sighed. "Cameron, is this your idea of a guided tour of Britain? Identifying all the cars we pass on the motorway?"

  He looked puzzled. "Well, you didn't know them, did

  you? I haven't seen a Moggie Thou in the States. Thought you'd be interested."

  "Why stop with cars?" asked Elizabeth sarcastically. "See those black-and-white cows in the field? Those are Holsteins."

  Cameron smiled. "Actually, they're not. In this country they're called Friesians." Noting the dangerous look in her eyes, he added hastily, "All right! You're the tourist. Just what would you like to see?"

  And for the next fifty-six miles she told him.

  TRAVELER'S DIARY

  Haworth doesn't seem to have changed much since the Brontes' time. Despite the fact that their home has become a shrine for half the English lit majors in the world, the village itself is still a tiny community off a side road in the Yorkshire moors. It wasn't even listed on our map.

  "I know the Bronte sisters were notorious recluses," I told Cameron, "but an unlisted village is going a bit far!"

  He finally located it on a Yorkshire map, in the vicinity of Bradford, and, as out of the way as it was, he agreed to take me there. I had packed a paperback copy of Wuthering Heights in my suitcase because I'd hoped we could visit Haworth. There is a modem part of the town down in the valley; you can see it from the road as you drive in, but the village as the sisters knew it is a collection of stone houses on the top of a hill, centering on the church and on the Black Bull Tavern, where Branwell got drunk and claimed to have written Emily's book.

  I had a real wallow in Haworth, as Cameron so ungallantly phrased it. It was past eight in the evening when we got there (but the sky was as light as afternoon), so the church and the shops were closed, but I insisted on spending an hour in the churchyard, looking for the Bronte graves. (That was a waste of time. When we went into the church the next morning, we discovered the plaque that said the family was buried in a crypt inside the church. There are no graves, per se. So much for a private word with Emily.) Then, as the sun was setting, I hauled Cameron off to the moors, sat on a hill in the white heather, and read my favorite passages from Wuthering Heights:

  ". . .1 was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy ."

  Cameron was looking somewhat restive, since his knowledge of British literature equals my knowledge of manatee breeding. I ignored the glazed look in his eyes and kept reading. It was so beautiful, to be out on the actual moor on which Emily used to wander, in the gathering twilight . . . no one within miles of us. It could have done with a few trees, but it was still lovely. Miles and miles of dark green hills outlined in stone walls, and nothing of the twentieth century in sight.

  In an effort to capture Cameron's flagging attention (which was probably focused on car repair), I began to explain the plot of the novel, and that the passage I was reading explained Catherine's love for Heathcliff. Very romantic, I thought, hoping that
he'd come and sit by me. No such luck.

  ". . .He does not know what being in love is?" "I see no reason that he should not know, as well as you," I returned; "and if you are his choice, he'll be the most unfortunate creature that ever was born! As soon as you become Mrs. Linton, he loses friend, and love, and all! Have you considered how you'll bear the separation, and how he'll bear to be quite deserted in the world? Because, Miss Catherine—" "He quite deserted! We separated!" she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. "Who is to separate us, pray? They'll meet the fate of Milo ..."

  My voice trailed off, and I wouldn't look at Cameron. As many times as I'd read Wuthering Heights, I hadn't seen that. Of course, it wouldn't have registered before. I had been trying not to think about my own Milo and all the awkwardness that had occurred when I came back from the Highland Games, having met Cameron, and ended the "understanding" we'd had for a couple of years.

  Milo had taken it well. "I'm a forensic anthropologist," he kept saying. "I don't understand live people." But I knew he was hurt, and the guilt was like a pebble in my shoe. I couldn't quite shake it. I really did feel caught between Linton and Heathcliff—only I wasn't sure which was which.

  Cameron must have seen me blush and guessed what word had thrown me, but British reserve does not allow him to discuss such matters. "Very nice book," he observed politely. "Now, which one of the Bronte sisters was it who wrote Pride and Prejudice?"

  By the time I stopped laughing, the mood had passed and so had the light, so we went down the hill and followed the path back to the village for dinner at the Black Bull Tavern, where Branwell Bronte drank himself to death—perhaps from a broken heart.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The drive from London to Edinburgh had been a clash of tourism, compounded of Elizabeth's romantic Britain and Cameron's more prosaic stopping points. Oxford University and the Donnington Park car museum; the Brontes' village and Harry Ramsden's famous fish restaurant; the Border Abbeys and the Dewsbury market (cheap tools, tape recorders, and electronics parts). They tolerated each other's obsessions with affectionate good humor, but with very little real interest.