The Avalon Chanter Read Online Free PDF

intact, its mossy slates peeking over
the windowed wall. “There’s the chapel.”
    “ I was thinking chapels were generally
on the east. That’s on the north.”
    “ Depends on the lay of the land and the
whims of the builders. Maggie’s trying to prove the chapel has at
least an Anglo-Saxon substructure. If she’s trying to make an
Arthurian connection, then she’s hoping the chapel dates back even
further, to the original Celtic priory. It might. The records don’t
have nearly as much about Farnaby as they do about
Lindisfarne.”
    “ Are the records saying anything at
all?”
    “ There are legends of an early prioress
with magical powers, but I bet those are typical Celtic saint
stories. All we know for sure is that the chapel isn’t a Lady
Chapel—why should it be, the whole priory is dedicated to St.
Mary—but a chantry chapel. A chapel endowed by somebody wealthy in
honor of a dead relative or comrade or even himself, including
funds to pay a cantarist, a priest, to man it.”
    “ A cantarist? Like the cantor in a
Jewish service?”
    “ Yep. The root’s from the Latin for
‘sing’, cantare or something
like that, although I guess chantry priests didn’t always sing or
chant. The point was to offer prayers to decrease the time the
honored person’s soul spent in purgatory, and to keep on offering
the prayers forever. Forever arrived at the Reformation, though. I
guess purgatory is pretty crowded these days.”
    With eerie cries, several
oystercatchers spiraled down into the nearby cemetery and settled
into a circle on the grass. Next to them rose a monument in
polished granite, so new the emblem of a fiddle and bow was still
sharply incised, as were the dates beneath. Walter “Wat” Lauder . He had barely achieved his
allotted three score years and ten.
    The other half of the monument
displayed a carved scroll, the words Elaine
Peveril Lauder , and a birth date two years before
Wat’s. The blank patch of granite yet to be engraved reminded Jean
of an open grave.
    “ Jean,” Alasdair said. “We’re
away.”
    She looked around to see Tara and Crawford
walking toward the priory. A human figure sat on a broken column
drum in the shadow of the tallest wall. A tentative shadow, the sun
now filtered by cloud and casting not the golden light of early
evening but a thin gilded gleam.
    Loony Lauder herself. Stepping lively, Jean
and Alasdair caught up with the others at the gap in the wall that
marked the church’s western door.
    Maggie sat in the attitude of Rodin’s
famous statue The Thinker ,
back curved, elbows braced on thighs, chin set on fist. Her boots,
camouflage pants, and jacket resembled Tara’s. Her body, more
abundant in hips and chest, did not. Neither did her face when she
looked up.
    Jean deleted her memory of precise features.
The pale and puffy face before her resembled that of a corpse
pulled from deep water. Maggie’s blue eyes, which had once sparkled
with intellectual inquiry, now seemed reclusive and dull. Her brown
hair, which had once been cut in a short, professional style, was
now long, purplish-red, and tied in a straggling bun atop her
head.
    Mid-life crisis, Jean told herself. Go
figure. She and Alasdair had each endured a mid-life crisis and
ended up with each other. The jury was still out on what Maggie
would end up with.
    “ Thank you for coming, Edwin. Ms.
Fairbairn, good to see you again. I assume this is Mr. Cameron?”
Maggie’s voice originated in her diaphragm rather than in her sinus
cavities like Tara’s, but still it squealed with
tension.
    Murmurs of greeting and handshakes passed
back and forth. “Sorry to get here so late,” Jean went on. “We got
lost—er, took the scenic route—were delayed—I hear Miranda
rang.”
    “ Quite so.” Maggie looked past the
red-tiled and gray-slated roofs of the village, more than a few of
them sporting small satellite dishes. She looked past the little
tower atop the cliff over the sea to the smeared streak of