The car door slammed, and the engine roared. Kate opened the door and stared at me curiously. Then she looked at the taillights disappearing down the road and smiled. On the way to my room, I didn’t stop to consider, after everything I’d experienced that day, how odd it was that Traquair felt much more like home than any other I’d ever known.
Two
I wrinkled my nose, deliberately sealing off my nasal passages. The church was musty, smelling of damp and mold and the subtle odor of decaying flesh entombed deep within ancient stone walls.
Wiping clammy palms on my skirt, I concentrated on the curved arches and stained glass windows of the Maxwell family chapel. Even after all these years and countless visits in the name of research to mausoleums and family vaults, I could never quite acclimate myself to the stench of death. It seemed to me that I could feel the essence of those who died. They haunted me with their images, touching my skin with bloodless fingers, pulling at my hair and clothing with pale, insistent hands.
Like an old enemy, the panic inside my chest lifted its head. Balling my fists, I focused on the words of the liturgy. It was an Anglican service, enough like those of my childhood to sound familiar. Throughout history, the Maxwells had stubbornly refused to renounce their Catholicism. But Ellen had been a staunch Episcopalian. Since her husband’s death twenty years before, only the rites of the Church of England were practiced in the small Maxwell chapel.
It was jammed to full capacity with mourners lining the walls of the inner sanctuary as well as the stone steps outside. I experienced a flicker of guilt. There were so many without seats. Who was I, a stranger, to take up an entire pew when so many of Ellen’s friends and acquaintances stood outside? I looked around uncertainly. Why had no one entered the pew where I sat? I turned and looked directly behind me, surprising a whispering couple into instant silence. The woman blushed scarlet.
I turned back to face the altar and saw him from the corner of my eye. Ian sat three rows back. I hadn’t seen nor heard from him since Ellen’s death three days before. Attached to his side, her arm through his, sat a woman whose face could be on a magazine cover. Much as I would have liked another look, I didn’t have the nerve to turn around again. Embarrassed, I bent my head and closed my eyes, pretending to pray, thankful that I was in the front and no one could see the flaming color rise in my cheeks. It never occurred to me to ask if he was married. So much for fantasies.
The priest had finished the eulogy. Rows of mourners stood and slowly inched toward the open coffin to pay their last respects to the lady of Traquair. The only exit was through the entrance to the chapel or out the doors on either side of the coffin. My palms were clammy with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.
Clutching my purse, I slipped out of the pew and stood in the line of mourners, resolving to forego the distasteful and, in my mind, pagan practice of viewing the dead and escape through the door. The woman in front of me wept into her handkerchief, soaking it completely. Fidgeting with the clasp of my purse, I managed to open it. Locating a packet of tissue, I offered it to her. She clutched my arm and thanked me with a watery “Bless you, my dear.” With her arm holding me captive and her solid body wedged between Ellen’s coffin and the first row of seats, I was caught. There was no help for it but to stare down at the woman who had taken one look at my face and died.
I’d expected Ellen Maxwell to look peaceful. But she didn’t. She looked angry. I couldn’t know it at the time, but the mortician had arranged her features as he remembered them from life, haughty and incensed. Looking down at that cold, sour face, I could only believe she wore that expression for me. Lady Maxwell wanted to send the unmistakable message that, despite her husband’s last will and testament, she held me in contempt. An American woman from Boston was no fit heiress for the ancient seat of the Maxwells. Why, then, had she invited me? There was a hint of something else in